“Who will buy the goods?” is a question I often see asked when one is presented with the notion that robots will displace workers. If employees are made redundant by machines and are then unable to find gainful employment, they will lose their purchasing power and be unable to afford the goods and services they once worked to provide. If we look to the past for answers to this question, we find that the cost of goods will fall as a result of the new found efficiency. Weavers were one of many artisanal jobs to experience this first hand; cloth goods made by a skilled weaver were more expensive and of lesser quality than those produced by their mechanized counterparts. As a result, career weavers were displaced from their work violently rebelled, and were subsequently quelled. Though thousands of highly skilled artisans were made redundant, the goods that they produced became widely accessible and infinitely more intricate. A similar series of events followed in a multitude of other industries, but all with the same outcome: more, cheaper, higher quality goods.

Those who were made redundant would have attempted to seek out employment, but with a now useless skill-set and all the obligations of your average head of household, it’s not hard to imagine that their prospects were bleak. It is often argued that automation does not destroy jobs, but merely move them around. One part of an economy may lose employment opportunities while another will create them, on the whole the amount of work remaining relatively unchanged. Again, looking to the past would seem to confirm this. At the same time the aforementioned artisans were being replaced, new work was being created. Increased efficiency meant more throughput, which in turn meant more demand for raw materials. Despite the mechanization of many of these processes as well, there would eventually have been new jobs created in the pursuit of expanding production capacity, even if they were not in time for those initially displaced. Additionally, the creation of new goods and services, as well as mechanized processes to support them exploded in number creating further new employment.

In the above instance, humanity progressed from simply creating goods to creating mechanized processes to create goods. Nowadays, pretty much everything owes at least some small part of it’s creation to a mechanized process. For decades we have been designing and implementing labor saving innovations to support every facet of our modern world. Just as artisans were displaced, we have continued to displace workers from countless jobs which have been made redundant over the years. Even the term ‘computer’ was once used to identify an individual who’s job was computation, where now it universally refers to electronic computers.

So then. If this is the way things go, why all the concern for robots? Surely they are just another labor saving innovation, fated to follow the same trajectory of the countless others that proceeded them, right? The problem, at least as I see it, is that while an auto-loom displaced a weaver by being ‘more skilled’ (that is, able to do the same job quicker and better), robotic arms are poised to displace jobs that rely on actions performed by human arms, for the same reason. Almost anything that predicated on the use of physical strength or dexterity can, and will soon be done by a machine. Unlike the auto-loom (and other, similar devices) which affected one cross section of the industrial activities of humanity, intelligent robotic arms (and computers) are positioned to simultaneously impact thousands of fields. That will mean hundreds of thousands of redundantly skilled humans suddenly unable to pay their bills, a mad scramble for what little employment opportunities still exist, and ultimately the realization that such an effort is futile anyway.

Judging by the actions of the world’s corporations, I have to conclude that they disagree with my final sentence above. “New jobs will be created.” and, “The economy will adapt, as it always has.” are two of the points I most often see used to dismiss technological unemployment. The belief that new work will somehow be resistant to automation, despite the clear evidence that both physical and intellectual types of work (our two notable abilities as humans) are under threat by robots and AI, is widespread. When pressed however nobody seems to have any idea (even fantastical) what this work (which will apparently provide jobs to literally billions of relatively unskilled people) is. The second point I can agree with, however. We will adapt. But not in the way I suspect the leaders of industry envision. Personally I see the notion of a for-profit business disappearing like a fart in the wind. It was a good idea; the embodiment of carrot-on-a-stick mentality… just keep chasing that profit… but it’s outlived it’s usefulness.

The traditional notion of jobs needs to end. People should instead be free. Free to pursue their own interests; to do what they feel is worth doing, as far as they feel like doing it. Our technology can enable that today. In the same way that the mechanization of weaving led to widely accessible cloth, the automation of the production of automation implements will lead to widely accessible automation. We will have no need to strive for profit above all else, as individuals will instead choose what goods and services they utilize and support based solely on their own specific demands. With limitless ability to create and provide these goods, there will simply be no need for the restrictive policies of corporations, beholden to shareholders and at the mercy of the dollar. We are each of us our own CEO, on the precipice of being handed the reins to a slice of our Earth’s resources. Like the weavers, business as usual will be displaced, with or without the participation of it’s overseers.

Expect a rebellion by the true champions of the status quo, but this time is different. This time it’s the people, not the corporations, who will do the quelling.