There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new… In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term “technological unemployment”…

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to comeâ€”namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

There is a long Wikipedia article on technological unemployment, where you can learn that people have been concerned about it for centuries… long before we could even imagine robots and computers. It is a recurrent theme of western thought.

Personally, I am unconcerned by technological unemployment as a threat. On the long run, I think that we can create jobs out of thin air if we need to (something I call “transemployment”). I strongly disagree with people like Tyler Cowen who think that regular folks are doomed.

We should first recognize the thesis for what it is. Currently, most people get most of their income through jobs. But jobs provide a lot more than just income. They also provide meaning and a social status. In some countries, like the USA, people often get access to critical health services through their employment. Unemployed people are more likely to be sick or depressed, they are less likely to be seen as viable mates… and so forth. We live in a society where even billionaires have “jobs”. If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed. I think that this process is well under way. But how will we pay for it all? Well. Consider that if human labor becomes unnecessary, it follows that the wealth is being created by the robots, so it is still there. Some authors fear that technology will result in a radical concentration of wealth, the like of which we have never seen… while a few people will be super wealthy, all of us will slowly starve. Except that fewer people than ever in history are starving! It is true that people without a high school education in the US earn much less than the more educated. And there is an income gap building up. However, in the US, the less educated also enjoy a much higher amount of leisure time. Some of us envy the CEOs, but let us not forget that many of them work 60 hours or more. Do we really want all to focus our lives almost entirely on “jobs” forever and ever? Can’t we imagine a world where jobs are relatively secondary aspects of our lives? Maybe in the future, when we speak with teenagers, we will never mention employment as something they need to be concerned with.

I think that we can’t automate fast enough. I work for a university where too many people spend too much time on routine work, filling out the same forms day after day. We can’t seem to outrun bureaucracy with automation. Hospitals can’t find enough qualified nurses willing to work at modest wages: we need to more automation in health care, and we need it now. China is running out of young factory workers, they can’t get the robots in place soon enough.

I really do wish that we were much further along regarding technological unemployment. My bias as a techno-optimist is to be bullish on technology… but let us look at the signs… is technological unemployment something that we can observe around us?

Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low.