Model 1) There's a finite amount of work out there. Computers will replace mental jobs just like robots killed physical jobs. We're all heading towards unemployment.
Model 2) Employment is determined by the value of an employee. Technology makes employees more valuable, not less. Employees will get more bargaining power as technology improves, not less.
The economic consensus is with #2, because feedback systems appear to drive down high unemployment over time (though bad governance can definitely interfere). One feedback system might be: idle people will eventually conspire to discover and meet the wants of others.
That's abstract though, it might be helpful to look closer to home.
Consider the fear that software will take over everyone's work. It's easy to forget that programmers know exactly how this goes. They have already cannibalized a lot of their work with software. The last fifty years of programming language (IDE, engine, ...) development has been a steady progress of finding ways to get software to write software, to do all the annoying grunt work of the job.
As programmers became more efficient, and crank out more and more complex tools over time, has the demand for code steadily decreased? Have we now solved all the world's problems that can be solved through code? Or has the problem space expanded to meet our capacity? Has the demand for programmers increased because their time is now much more valuable than it was in the era of punch cards?
Note more broadly, jobs are picking up right now as part of the recovery, despite continual technological improvement.
I think the economic consensus is with #2 because so much of the available data so consistently points that way, so it's easy to dismiss the other model as just natural human pessimism about the future. Maybe the pessimistic model is right and we just don't know it yet, but I think it currently has the weaker case.
Imagining this future doesn't seem too outre.
Just speculation but isn't that already the case? I don't have the numbers but I wonder what percentage of the human population is in the working force or, better yet, what percentage of our collective "waking hours" is spend working, with or without monetary compensation.
We're still going to have a lot of jobs in the mid-term, probably even long-term. 70%, 60% of the working populace in the mid-term maybe, and not too few of those in menial/blue collar jobs. We still need to fill these jobs, and a generous basic income would make these jobs highly unpopular. So we can either set a basic income that is not high enough to solve the problem it was trying to solve, or we create a situation like in Saudi Arabia – where all the undesirable jobs are taken by foreign jobbers (from nations without basic income, or war zones, or…), while the natives grow fat and lazy.
Not exactly an economic policy I'd have expected from the Left.
Or we could just let the wage for those undesirable jobs rise to a level that someone will take them, even though they're getting the basic income.
Why shouldn't someone get paid a lot of money for (e.g.) trimming my toenails? Someone else would have to pay me a lot of money to do that.
To avoid that would take substantial further reductions in birth rates beyond that which is baked in based on current trends.
EDIT: Let me adjust this a bit. UNs World Population Prospects 2015 [1] says "Continued population growth until 2050 is almost inevitable, even if the decline of fertility accelerates." and their middle and top estimates shows continued growth until 2100, though rapidly shrinking growth. The low end estimate shows a reduction in the latter half of the century. Almost all of this growth is expected to be in developing countries, however.
[1] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_W...
Awesome!
Seriously, which is it? Either capitalism is going to fail because there aren't enough workers, or it's going to fail because robots are taking all the jobs. Can't have both!
Because, of course, having both would be fine... no catastrophe, life continues as normal as it has in the face of every prediction of imminent disaster. We have less workers due to demographic changes, but that's cool because we need less workers. We sort out the political problem of how to stop all the money going to to <1% of the population, we're all good.
I wouldn't call the circumstances in Europe 1815-1945, when the last massive societal upheavals happened, "life as normal".
> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years
But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.
The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.
We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.
And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?