The future is uncertain and the end is always near...



The long term picture looks bleak for humanity with automation taking over most jobs. Can you or what you do be replaced by a robot? Nobody is talking about this out here they have two stores with no checkouts you just pick stuff up and walk out and it cost a billion dollars for the first two stores.

In 1870, half of U.S. workers were in agriculture. Today’s figure is 2 percent. True, but how about horses? Back in 1900, we had 21 million working horses. By 1960, it was 3 million. Today? Too few to count.

Are we going the way of the horse? And what about the deep economic question that today’s CEO masters of the universe aren’t asking: Who will buy the goods and services their companies produce if everyone is out of work or, at least, out of good work?

I asked this question in a recent co-authored paper (”Robots Are Us”) posted at kotlikoff.net/research. My three fellow co-authors and I modeled robots as smarter versions of us. In our paper, we showed that robots’ development will make the economy boom as their creators reap large rewards.