Automation is defined as “The use of largely automatic equipment in a system of manufacturing or other production process.” It is happening now, and has been ongoing and increasing for a long time.
These days we wonder why it takes so much more to get by. We look around and see so many struggling. We lament the changing world wherein the same drive and work that could once, barring mischief or mischance, most times secure a rewarding and comfortable life, are enough these days to probably eat today and be sure of eating tomorrow. We see and rightly decry the fact that a handful of people own more wealth than the other half of humanity. Then some look at a modern assembly line or a "hands-free car wash” or a "self-checkout lane” and still don't see the enormous hurdle looming ahead.
These two examples help to illustrate. The vast majority of us have worked either on a jobsite or in a restaurant:
What happens when robots can perform every single mechanical function performed today by a traditional restaurant staff?
What happens when robots can frame an entire house in a week, other bigger robots can put it where it goes in another day or two, and then more robots can finish it, plumbing, heating, wiring, drywall, trim, flooring and all, in another week?
It won't be long. For many of those examples we are already there. For that entire list to be reality, let’s say a hundred years. A relatively short time. And then what? What are all those cooks and servers and bussers and dishwashers and excavators and carpenters and plumbers and electricians and masons and drywallers going to do? What are the huddled masses going to do when all those jobs are gone? Are they doomed to starve because a degree in robotics might be out of reach?
Maybe they won’t all be gone. A few might hang on. A hundred years from now some places might still have human wait staff. The most expensive places. Painting/finishing or remodeling crews might still find work, at least in high rent areas.
As for most of the rest of them?
As it’s too often said: “You’re fired.”
And so far that seems to be the plan. Let’s face it, compared to robots humans are messy and unpredictable. We're cranky and clumsy and occasionally tardy. We tend to demand such pesky things as time off and pay raises and fair treatment and breathable air. And all of those peccadilloes and demands are to one degree or another costly to business. A robot, operating properly, does none of them.
So the march of automation continues. Over the long game it's likely that most industries requiring large numbers of human workers will go the way of the telegraphist and the blacksmith and be utterly obsolete.
The march continues.
But so does the ongoing burgeon of humanity's numbers over the face of the earth.
Some 7.5 billion of us at last count.
And that ever-mounting press of people needs to eat, employed or not, or they/we are going to starve.
We’ll need help, and history has shown us that government and nothing else can provide that help on the scale we will need.
Not that it always does, but that it's the only thing that can.
Charity can't do it consistently or on a large enough scale.
Business as a rule does not care.
And so we must trust in government.
