On the other side, of course, are those who have been clinging to the very convictions that Grey's video spends fifteen minutes dismantling: that automating grunt work will free up humans to do other, more intellectual work, improving life for displaced workers once they've all been retrained and reentered the workforce as higher-skilled, better-credentialed high-tech workers.
Never mind that we have no way to retrain anywhere near 10% of our work force, let alone 25%, 40%, or more, or any clear idea what new jobs we'd be retraining them to do; never mind that the rise of high-tech industries hasn't actually succeeded in doing this at any point in the last thirty years. We should just stop worrying about a future where those workers who are still employed are also largely disposable, and where everyone else gets to take on enormous debt loads in the form of college loans, often as middle-aged students who'll have little hope of paying off those debts. Once these technologies start rolling out in the real world, the argument goes, we'll have a better idea of the impact they'll have on the employment picture, and we should all just chill out until that happens.
Enter Uniqlo, who have just rolled out this technology in the real world, as reported by Quartz:
The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The warehouse can now also operate 24 hours a day.
That sounds to me like a company planning to double its revenue by chopping its human workforce by 90%, exactly the sort of scenario that the CGP Greys of the world are predicting. That sort of economic pressure will not be resistible; if companies in Japan are doing this, then companies in China, India, the EU, and the USA will all be forced to follow suit, or find themselves out-competed right out of existence. This is the automation revolution, and it's not a hypothetical possibility; it's already underway.
This is the economic framework in which we now find ourselves; this is the sort of thread to human employability that has people talking about the Universal Basic Income as a way to provide the basics of life to people who find themselves not merely unemployed but unemployable, all through no fault of their own; and also to support an economy that can't function if these same unemployable former workers no longer have money to spend on the products of that automated global manufacturing and distribution system.
Oh, that that system's functioning, which makes our way of life possible, is also polluting our planet, propelling a new mass extinction event, and raising the global temperature in ways which will be devastating for up to 90% of the planet's human population. The fact that many of those same people will be left without access to the economic resources needed to cope with this catastrophic climate change just adds insult to injury,
Worse yet? None of this is preventable anymore. It's already happening; the question isn't, "will it have these impacts?" The question is, "how intense will the effects be?"
Welcome to the Singularity, already in progress.