Fewer, Richer, Greener

15Robots Don’t Work for Free: A Meditation on Technology and Jobs

Are robots going to take away all our jobs? Will we have a Robot Apocalypse? No, we won’t. Like all the technological changes that came before them, robots and related technologies are just ways of enhancing productivity.

Robots are a convenient and colorful metaphor for any new technology that makes work easier and workers more productive. First, let’s say what I mean by a robot. In a very real sense, all labor-saving devices are robots, and all devices are labor saving or we wouldn’t use them. To a prehistoric farmer, an ox hitched to a plow is a robot. To a man with a horse, a car is a robot. To the women who were called calculators and depicted in the movie Hidden Figures, an electronic computer is a robot.

So robots are going to take away almost all of our jobs, as they have in the past, and give us new jobs that we couldn’t previously imagine existing. That’s the short version.

The long version is that what we now perceive as “real robots”—advanced electromechanical devices that appear to “think” for themselves—can, in fact, do some of the jobs we are accustomed to doing for ourselves. This substitution will increase.

How will this transformation affect our lives in the future?

What has been waggishly called the robot apocalypse is really just an extension of the ongoing, millennia-old transition from human muscle power to animal power to machine power, making work easier and multiplying productivity a ...