Editors' pick: Originally published May 5, 2016.

The problem's plain to see, Styx frontman Dennis DeYoung sang, somewhat plaintively, in 1983: There's too much technology. Machines are dehumanizing the world.

Today, more than three decades after Mr. Roboto climbed to No. 3 on Billboard magazine's Top 10, that effect has increased exponentially, with machines capable of handling more and more jobs once believed to be the exclusive purview of humans.

Tech giant Google (GOOG) - Get Reportis developing driverless cars, law school graduates are losing lucrative entry-level jobs to document-scanning software and branches at Bank of America (BAC) - Get Report and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) - Get Report are being replaced by digital services such as deposits via smartphone.

That's likely to make maximum employment, one of the Federal Reserve's mandates, look considerably different in the coming decades, says Bill Gross, the Janus Capital fund manager who previously built Pimco into a trillion-dollar asset manager where he was known as the ''Bond King.'' Guaranteed income, which would distribute a base level of money to everyone regardless of need, may be the most viable answer.



"Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models," Gross wrote in his May investor outlook. Computer-driven vehicles are likely to replace taxi and bus drivers, costing millions of jobs over the next 10 to 15 years, he said.

White-collar positions will be increasingly at risk, too, in fields from medicine to investment management.

How should central banks and governments respond? Retraining and education, two items that perennially top the wish lists of political candidates, probably won't get the job done, Gross says.

"Four years of college for everyone might better prepare them to be a contestant on Jeopardy, but I doubt it'll create more growth," he wrote.

The guaranteed income he proposes as a remedy may be far removed from America's sociopolitical mainstream, but it's not without proponents. As Gross notes, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union, explores the possibility in Raising the Floor, a book scheduled for publication this summer.

"If more and more workers are going to be displaced by robots, then they will need money to live on, will they not?" Gross asked.

In Switzerland, voters will consider a referendum on June 5 that would guarantee all residents of the country a regular base payment, regardless of income or wealth. The amount isn't specified and would have to be set by the country's Parliament.

The Swiss government opposes the proposal, arguing that "considerable cutbacks or tax rises would be necessary to finance this basic income" and that some people might opt to drop out of the workforce.

Still, the vote and an advocacy for a similar measure in the U.K. by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, show the idea is gaining traction, Richard Reeves, a Brooking Institutions fellow, wrote on the think tank's website. The interest, he says, is largely because the labor market isn't adequately performing one of its three key roles: distributing national income through paychecks.

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Attempts to compensate by higher minimum wages, profit-sharing plans and education improvements may be just "sticking leaky band-aids over a growing gaping wound," Reeves said. "If the labor market is no longer going to cut it in terms of distribution, it might be time for more radical solutions."

The Royal Society's proposal calls for basic income of 3,692 pounds ($5,353) per year for almost everyone and a pension of 7,420 pounds for British citizens over age 65, according to a summary report. The measures would replace a hodge-podge of existing welfare benefits.

"Whether the new labour-saving technological innovations gathering momentum will lead to quite the pace of change in work that some have forecast is open to debate," Anthony Painter and Chris Thoung noted in a separate Royal Society report. "What does seem clear, however, is that there is very likely to be underemployment, unemployment or the need to transition careers with some frequency for many."

Indeed, labor market data already show the challenges. While baseline unemployment in the U.S. is roughly half its 2009 peak of 10%, the figure masks people who have stopped looking for jobs. About 78% of the eligible workforce between 25 and 54 years old is employed now, compared with 82% at the 2000 peak, Gross wrote, citing the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"That seems small, but it's really huge," he continued. "We're talking 6 million fewer jobs. Do you think it's because millennials just like to live with their parents and play video games all day? I think not. Technology and robotization are changing the world for the better but those trends are not creating many quality jobs."

The bottom line, he says, is that the "new age economy -- especially that of developed nations with aging demographics -- is gradually putting more and more people out of work."

An annual report from the President's Council of Economic Advisers released in February acknowledged the risk that advances in robotics may lead to decades of high jobless rates as the workforce gathers the education and training needed for jobs demanding progressively higher skills.

"While industrial robots have the potential to drive productivity growth in the U.S., it is less clear how this growth will affect workers," the report noted. "One view is that robots will take substantial numbers of jobs away from humans, leaving them technologically unemployed -- either in blissful leisure or, in many popular accounts, suffering from the lack of a job.

Most economists consider either outcome unlikely, since centuries of technological advances "have shown that, even as machines have been able to increasingly do tasks humans used to do, this leads humans to have higher incomes, consumer more, and creates jobs for almost everyone who wants them," the report's authors noted.

The critical question is how quickly the shift occurs, the report continues. "As an extreme example, if a new innovation rendered one-half of the jobs in the economy obsolete next year, then the economy might be at full employment in the 'long run.' But this long run could be decades away."

That will be among the challenges discussed by U.S. and Canadian advocates of basic income guarantees in a North American symposium later this month at the University of Manitoba.

In the meantime, said Gross, central banks are attempting to compensate, with negative interest rates in Europe and Japan that are intended to encourage lenders to extend credit rather than stockpile cash in reserves, and rates in the U.S. that were held near zero for eight years after the financial crisis.

While the Federal Reserve approved a 25 basis-point hike in December, the central bank has yet to enact another and has scaled back the likely number of increases this year to two from four.

For now, Gross predicts the Fed will engage in more quantitative easing, or buying back government bonds to stimulate the economy, and that central banks as a whole will "reluctantly accept their increasingly dependent role in fiscal policy," which would allow governments to focus on guaranteed income for unemployed workers.

Central banks don't want "to become a government agency by proxy," he noted, but that may just be the price they will pay for a civilized society that is quickly becoming less civilized due to robotization."