We're entering a "Star Trek" economy. Below, Manu Saadia explains some of the risks in an excerpt from his forthcoming book, "Trekonomics."

Refugee students walk out of a classroom in Tanzania. REUTERS/Frank Nyakairu There is considerable and justifiable anxiety about automation. It is not a new concern. It has been with us since the dawn of the Industrial Age. However, the convergence of added computing power, progress in programming, and so-called big data is accelerating the adoption of automated work across many sectors of the economy. We are moving beyond “dumb” robots, the kind that weld car bodies together based on a xed set of instructions. Automation is gaining ground in fields outside of manufacturing and logistics. Algorithms, software robots by another name, are now able to parse legal decisions, medical data, crime data, insurance claims.

This may not be nearly as fateful as it sounds, at least that is Star Trek’s take on it. The coming of the robots need not lead to impoverishment and idleness. Offloading most repetitive and mind-numbing tasks to mechanical workers, physical or digital, could prove liberating. In a world where work is no longer compulsory, it must become truly meaningful.

The danger lies in the transition to an economy where the cost of making stuff—industry—has become more or less like agriculture today (with very few people employed and a very low share of GDP). With appropriate policies in place, developed countries can probably manage that transition. They have in the past, and therefore it is safe to assume they most likely will in the future. It does not mean that we will not experience dislocations and conflicts, but we do have old and established institutions—government, the press, the public sphere— that allow us to resolve such conflicts over time for the greater benefit of all.

The real challenge will be beyond our comfortable borders, in the developing world. In both nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century Asia, national development has followed a similar pattern. People moved from the countryside to urban centers to take advantage of higher-paying jobs in factories and services. Again, South Korea offers a startling, fast-forward example of that: it underwent a complete transformation from a poor, rural country to a postindus trial, hyperurban powerhouse in less than fifty years. It was so rapid that most visible traces of the past have been erased and forgotten. The national museum in Seoul has a life-size reconstruction of a Seoul street in the 1950s, just like we have over here, but for the colonial era. And imagine this, China went down that very same path at an even faster clip. Half a billion impoverished people turned into middle-class consumers in three decades.

However, this may not happen again if manufacturing is reduced to the status of agriculture, a highly rationalized activity (read: employing very few people). The historically proven path to economic growth and prosperity taken by Korea and China might no longer be available to the next countries. This is what keeps many economists up at night. The rise of the robots will probably reduce economic opportunities for emerging nations. In the developed world, we have the resources and the institutions to manage that transformation of the economic base. Countries you rarely hear about today, say Uganda and Tanzania, are projected to have two hundred million and three hundred million inhabitants respectively by the end of the century. What is going to happen to these people if there are no opportunities for work and wages because the manufacturing of goods has become a trivial, automated low-returns business? Not all of them will find jobs at Starbucks, regardless of how big their cities are.

It turns out that the reinvention of work imagined by Star Trek and all the social adjustments that come with it are not just some kind of pleasant philosophical exercise for overfed upper-class Western consumers of entertainment. In a world where machines produce most of the goods at a marginal cost, a just and adequate distribution of resources is a matter of life or death for billions of people yet to be born.

Developed countries will or will not enact redistributive policies in the face of growing automation. The responses are well known, from progressive taxation to universal health insurance, and access to education to unconditional cash transfers, or so-called basic income. We possess stable institutions and the wealth to settle these matters adequately. Less developed countries do not yet. We are racing toward pervasive automation faster than they are catching up.

Manu Saadia is the author of "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek." Read about author appearances and more at Inkshares.