Automating ourselves out of work: the predicament that humankind seems destined to impose on itself

Much attention is being given to the matter of automation's role in the disappearance not only of longstanding occupations of all pay brackets, but even recent ones as well.

Streiff at RedState puts the matter starkly, which may well be the way it needs to be put at this time:

Where, you have a right to ask, is this going?

Society has dealt with economic dislocation before. Draft animals meant you no longer had to hitch the Old Lady to the wooden plow. Water mills replaced manual labor beginning in the Middle Ages. With each advance though, the manpower freed up flowed to newer and more lucrative pursuits. The first real break in the relationship between man and machine happened in the early part of the 19th century when an entire industry, weaving, was being eliminated by textile mills. The reaction was the Luddite movement that smashed mechanical looms and burned factories.

The movement was suppressed by British troops with substantial loss of life and over fifty of the Luddites were hanged. Change was imposed and everything went on as before except for the extinction of free weavers and home weaving that forced men and women into the mills as workers.

What makes the Luddite movement different from today is that the Luddites lived at a time where the franchise was reserved to a very small number of voters and many industrial cities, like Manchester, had no representation at all. Their concerns were irrelevant as they had no voice. Today is different. That truck driver who has just lost a $50K/year job to a robot votes.

What happens in industry after industry displaced workers no longer have a place to go because humans simply aren’t in demand? There are no trucks to drive. There is no fast food to serve. There may not even be brooms to push. But these men and women can not only vote they might very well outnumber those people with decent jobs. Keep in mind that well under 50% of the nation pays federal income tax.

Though suppressed, that Luddite inclination has never been far from the surface in Britain. In the early 1980s when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke the miners union by shutting down unproductive and nationalized mines, a columnist in the Economist commented that the difference between Britain and America was that in Britain miners went out on strike so their sons could go to work in the mines, in America miners went out on strike to ensure their sons never had to work in the mines. Maybe we have become Britain? Or maybe the miners we mocked in the 1980s were onto something that is only now becoming obvious.

What next? Because if you want a historical model of what happens when voting citizenry is unemployed and can vote you need to look no further than Rome of the “bread and circuses” era. Will we go the way of France with mandatory job sharing? Or Finland with a guaranteed basic income? At some point you begin to enter Atlas Shrugged territory.

Do you take the Randian/Darwinian route of saying “Devil take the hindmost?” Or, in my cultural vernacular, “root, hog, or die.” And how does this work when you are telling a majority of the nation to piss off? And the impact of this decision will be felt by people who might even be philosophically agreeable to that argument. Already we see story after story of people in their 30s, prime income earning years, moving back home because they can’t find a position in the economy that pays enough to live. The bill payer here is the parents. Do we really think the problems of declining family formation and declining birthrate are divorced from economic uncertainty?

I don’t know what the answer is but I am pretty sure that free trade in this environment is going to be a damned hard sell.

It is a pickle, isn't it? Government "solutions" - either putting a stop to the natural human impulse to innovate, or guaranteeing everyone a minimum income - would inevitably lead to an Orwellian, dehumanizing state of affairs in which meaning would dwindle.

But how is meaning to thrive if there's nothing to do?

I can't even envision the kind of blue-ribbon panel that ought to be assembled to look at it. Would the right ratio of forecasters from various industries, university wonks and government bureaucrats come up with an "aha!" way out?

I doubt it; the very notion of such a panel reeks of the administrative state that James Burnham warned us about in 1941.

Is, then, the answer for each of us to prayerfully inquire as to the nexus of the world's greatest need and our greatest fulfillment?

That seems closer to the mark, but requires a seismic shift on both the individual and collective levels.

It may be our inexorable destination, though. The ultimate question is, as it has always been, what are we here for?