Must-read: Manu Saadia: “Robots could be a big problem for the third world”

Must-Read: Manu Saadia: Robots could be a big problem for the third world: “If manufacturing is reduced to the status of agriculture, a highly rationalized activity…

…(read: employing very few people) [then] 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…. 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.