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100% Unemployment: on keeping busy when the robots take over (2013)

-keeping-busy-when-the-robots-take-over I'll begin with a healthy dose of pessimism. I write software for a living, and I am becoming more and more convinced that my job will soon – in a few years or a few decades – be outsourced.

But the technological state of the art continues to improve and corporations have huge economic incentives to replace me and my peers with something cheaper; for me, this alone is enough to lend credence to the possibility. When I was in grade school I wrote a conceptual short story that shares a title with this post (and is now mercifully lost to the entropogenic mists of time) on what would happen if all jobs were automated. I had only rudimentary knowledge of economics, and I certainly wasn't aware of ideas like the tragedy of the commons and the global coordination problem and Robin Hanson's em scenario, and I painted a rosy picture of our leisurely future—I had the sense not to allow things to go too smoothly, out of some vague intuition that stories need conflict to be worth telling.

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