AN EVER MORE EFFICIENT AND PRODUCTIVE ECONOMY IS NOT A PROBLEM...:

For more than a century, economists have maintained that new technologies create as many jobs as they destroy. Think of the auto plants that succeeded the buggy makers. But now robots and artificial intelligence have become so hugely sophisticated--doing more and more work that humans do, doing knowledge jobs and service jobs and no longer just factory jobs--that many economists say automation might begin wiping out far more jobs than it creates. That is one explanation economists give for why some five million workers have dropped out of the U.S. labor force since 2008. Not only does automated checkout replace many cashiers at CVS, but bellhop robots deliver items to hotel guests' rooms, software algorithms write sports articles for newspapers, and self-driving vehicles might someday replace truck and taxi drivers, perhaps even Uber drivers.

In a recent article, Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times wrote that over the "15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise." She noted that more than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from five percent in the late 1960s, while 30 percent of women in that age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.

Automation of course means greater productivity per worker, indeed greater economic output overall. And that's certainly a good thing. But what happens if today's vastly more sophisticated robots and automation lead to fewer jobs overall and millions of workers forced out of the labor market? This raises some weighty questions: How do we as a nation, as a world, share the benefits of automation? Will those benefits go overwhelmingly to the shareholders of the companies that own that automation--the companies that own the bellhop robots and the self-driving cars? (To be sure, automation helps lower production costs, leading to lower prices for consumers.)

If automation means we do not need as many workers, what happens to those displaced? Do we let them languish, do we let them fall into poverty? Or will we as a society figure out a way to spread the work--perhaps by adopting a four-day (or even three-day) workweek, spreading the work to reduce unemployment and giving full-time workers an extra day or two off? Or will we, should we, adopt a broader, more generous social safety net to help those displaced by ever more sophisticated automation?

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