Price Waterhouse Coopers has released a report today looking at which jobs might be taken by the robots in the coming years. Their actual findings are rather less bloodcurdling than some of the reporting on it for they're not, not in the slightest, saying that those whose jobs are automated therefore won't have jobs. Instead, as is true, people will go off and do some other job which isn't as much of a worry, is it?
Steven Mnuchin, who is now the Trump Administration's Treasury Secretary, is also not very worried about such reports:
The 15-year timeline does not appear to be shared by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, however. In comments made to Axios Media on Friday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was not worried about the mass displacement of U.S. workers by robots and could be a century before a labor crisis eventuates.
"It's not even on our radar screen ... 50-100 more years," Mnuchin said.
He added that he was "not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future.
"In fact I'm optimistic."
There are two entirely different things to think about here and Mnuchin is correct in that predictions of an immediately looming crisis simply aren't going to pan out:
The latest predictions from PricewaterhouseCoopers survey the damage for specific countries. Analysts at the consulting firm said that by the early 2030s, 38% of U.S. jobs are at a high risk of automation, more than in Germany, the U.K., and Japan.
If that change happened tomorrow then we'd absolutely have a problem. But 40% of jobs over 15 years? That's not a problem. For the U.S. economy chews up and spits out 5 to 10% of jobs each and every year. That's jobs that are destroyed--and then some other company comes along and invents some new job. There's also obviously some amount of technological drift in this. Sure, when one sock maker closes down and another opens up perhaps not very much technological drift. But people do change industries, new jobs are never quite exactly the same as old ones. So, if we're already doing this to 5-10% of all jobs every year 40% over 15 years just isn't that much of a problem.
Millions of workers around the world are at risk of losing their jobs to robots -- but Americans should be particularly worried.
No, not really, because as we can see the rate of change is something well within the capacity of the economy to handle. At which point the point Mnuchin is making, the idea of a crisis. If the rate is OK, what about the end state? What if the robots are doing everything and none of us have jobs? Or, alternatively, what if many of us don't have jobs because the robots are doing all too much? Well, that's not actually a crisis at all. For example, currently, in the American economy, there are 96 million people not working, as Donald Trump keeps telling us. We don't think this is a problem, stay at home moms and so on aren't a problem. Actually, it's just great that we're a rich enough society that 96 million people can afford not to go to work.
So, the robots start to make more and more stuff. That obviously means that the society is richer--therefore we can have more than 96 million people not working. There just is no awful surprise in this process. And if the robots and up making everything and no one has a job? Well, if the robots are making everything then we've all got all we want, no? So what problem is that?
