Here is a continuation of the Economist‘s musings about automation:

The possibility of a world in which a rather large share of the population works as drivers, simply because human labour has gotten too cheap to automate out of the job, should focus minds on the nature of the policy challenge economies are beginning to face. Is work—and the link between work and the earning of an income sufficient to live on—so important to society that we should want millions of people to function as meatware: doing jobs sensors and computers could and would do if only there were not an excess supply of humans needing to work in order to afford food and shelter?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a genuine puzzle that societies will find themselves confronting in coming decades. It will be obvious to many people that the answer is no and just as obvious to many others that the answer is yes. I cannot begin to say which side will win the argument.

The idea is that as automated vehicle technology becomes more effective and inexpensive, it will start to put more drivers out of work. But having more drivers available will reduce wages for drivers, possibly below what the automated technology costs and reducing the incentive for further development of the technology. It’s logical, but this sort of thing must have happened throughout history, and technology tends to win even if it takes a while. Take agricultural technology like diesel-powered tractors – when they got cheaper and more effective, they put enormous numbers of agricultural workers out of work. For the most part, those people didn’t accept lower wages and continue as agricultural workers, they migrated and tried to find better jobs in manufacturing, jobs that were also unfortunately drying up due to globalization and automation. The result, in the U.S. at least, was formation of a (seemingly, so far) permanent new underclass. So not only are these issues about technology vs. jobs, they are about how (whether) the wealth created by the new technology is going to be shared throughout society. In theory, we could retrain people and better educate their children, while also working less and sharing income more broadly. But that doesn’t sound like the American way, does it?