What can never be replaced? How will the economy react? Does it really 'free' us from menial labour and provide value from more minds being able to 'think'?
The world is automated in stages. We have no farmers now because we have machines to do the backbreaking work. We have no scribes now because we have machines to make the text. We don't have a litany of old professions because someone created a device that could break bigger boulders and lay longer tracks, faster and more efficiently than any man. And yet, the John Henry's of the world all still have work. Every time we manage to simplify the work enough for machines to do it, we go about complicating new work enough to keep our minds interested in it. Farmers turn into nutritionists, chefs, brewers, and bakers. Some expand their business and become managers, marketers, clerks, and bean counters. The end of one job has always brought about a dozen more. We automate the jobs we hate. The jobs, like flipping burgers, we turn into boogey men that hide under the beds of those who don't get a good education. We automate the things we hate, and because we hate them we have to convince herds of people that those jobs are all they are good for, the best they will ever do. So it's no surprise now, when we talk about the technologies that will take these jobs away, that the herds begin to bristle with panic. They believe there will be no more jobs because they have been convinced there are no other jobs for them. But just like in every other turning of technology, they are wrong. There are thousands of jobs out there, jobs that become available solely because the other job disappear. Jobs that come to be because many of us like to complain, and if we can't complain about work then we will complain about leisure. The worst companies in the world find themselves in that position because of lackluster customer service. We demand more from our experiences because we don't have dirt under our fingers and bruises on our bones. Because a clerical error of $5 is the biggest offense we'll suffer for a season. People will flock to companies that know this, that make people feel welcome and cared for, that affirm the struggles of the individual. Conversely, those who do not find their pleasure in complaining will find their pleasure in free time. They will seek to maximize the time for themselves by minimizing the time demanded by others. You see this already in monthly services that send you new clothes tailored to your style, that send you full meals five steps from being fully prepared, that rent cars as you need them and never charge you for repairs. The the service economy slowly recedes into an ocean of automation, the economy of support will take its place. In it we may work less, but I am certain we will all still have work to do.
You are right that it does not inherently benefit workers. However the goal for most automation is not only profit in the areas of production but to lower worker injury. Most (MOST) automatted processes have to be designed from the very beginning, or it becomes VERY costly for a business to automate. What you have done is pointed out technology, but not necessarily automation, the two are related but not interchaingable. I also agree that these are horrendus violations but none of these have helped as much as automating the processes of car manufacturing to create safer areas for workers. I happen to be one of these people who get calls at night to urgently fix a problem. But if I were given the time and opportunity to automate things where I work, 99% of the tasks I get called about would disappear. I would live in a restful night, and my boss would be happier. But because it's not something that can be done in a week or even a few months, the automation of these processes will not happen, and I will remain restless. Like I said I agree that with many technologies business owners see $$$ but what engineers and others see is of a much greater contribution to humanity.Here's what I'm getting at: the idea that anything that brings about greater productivity and profit will inherently benefit workers is wrong, and that includes technology. Where productivity and profit margins grow, you find management tempted to try to wring out even more, usually by aiming the spear downward in some fashion. If it's not in outright layoffs, it's through new forms of labor discipline, which are conveniently omitted from techno-utopians' minds.
And in fact, with advances in technology come ever greater ways to enforce labor discipline. From the New Deal years to the Nixon era, when the work day ended that was it --work ended, shop talk was kept to a minimum, your private life began. From the Nixon years onward, there's been a relentless push by managers to use technology for controls upon workers' private lives: drug testing, background checks, psychometric tests, video surveillance, electronic health records, and now the use of smartphones to mandate that workers remain constantly on call.
These are not inevitable advances in technology. Owners and managers invested great sums of money into new technologies specifically to knuckle down on the workforce under the rubric of human resources, without ever bothering to remunerate them for their loss of liberty, and now it's "normal" for people to get calls from their boss in the dead of night to urgently fix some problem.
Say we automate: what happens to the low skill workers that were laid off? In an utopia we'd re-educate them and let them develop new skills, fill new economical niches. But in China and India the people who filled those position lacked the education in the first place, and displacing them of their job there leaves many without one, or maybe drives standards of living even lower as they get more desperate. What I'm trying to insinuate is 'what will happen to the displaced low skill workers, and how will they affect society?'
Historically, and I don't have the book I am reading on this sorry. But automating a task creates more jobs rather than less. Usually the displaced workers are hired into management positions for the company, or are hired to specialize in monitoring equipment. Can you give an example in China or India of a previously unautomatted task becoming automatted and a worker losing their job? I ask not because I am trying to be critical of the argument (I know working conditions there are bad and companies have basically taken to both places as "dumping grounds" for cheap labor) but rather because I am curious of stories.
I will look for some more, it's too late at my time.
There are always going to be physical jobs that can only be done by a brain with hands attached. Machines are not adaptive enough to do some of the low-end stuff that makes everything else possible. Even if there was a robot that could drywall a house in a day, someone is going to have to be there to clean up after, set up before, and do the math to buy the parts. Someone is going to have to deliver the robot, set it up to begin the work, etc. Someone is going to have to see a need that can be automated, figure out how, build the robot, program it and teach others how to use it. The printing press was going to cause mass unemployment. The electric light was going to cause mass unemployment. The automobile was going to cause mass unemployment. Computers were going to cause mass unemployment. All these tools are going to be used in ways that we are too rooted in our own headspace to see coming. These techs are going to be used to create things and services that most of us here on this site will laugh at when introduced, then 10 years later get frustrated when they don't work. The interesting thing is that if we automate all these "low end" workers, what is that going to do to the trade deficit? Most of the low end manufacturing that the US takes advantage of is not in the US; it is in China and India etc. There is going to be an interesting time when the baby boomers finally start dying off and the millennials move in because with so few boomers retiring on time it will be the children of the millennials that run with all these new ways of doing things. 3D printing alone is amazing and is going to change EVERYTHING we do, and they are teaching that in classes here where I live.
It depends on how quickly it happens and due to what pressures. In the last 50 years manufacturing jobs have plummeted while productivity has risen. This has been largely due to technological innovation both in terms of process engineering and the automation of labor. Quality has improved, costs have dropped, angels sing the praises of automation. But what has also happened is that many of the labor intensive jobs simply moved somewhere else instead of automating. That's going to be due to a whole lot of factors but there is a large investment of capital in automating an operation and if you're only going to automate to produce one version of something (an iPhone for example) you might continue to have a more flexible operation staffed with trainable jobs (FoxConn) and efficiency improving machinery where possible. But what we've seen here in the mean time is cheaper goods, built for a population with stagnant income. That's about exactly what you would expect as an economy pivots from one segment to the next. Especially when you consider that the amount of people not even seeking employment is huge. The question becomes: Are we already seeing the short term effects of a fast changeover to replacing low skill workers with robots? We also need to consider what a 'robot' is. It's almost never going to be humanoid because for most applications the human form is no advantage. And really, if we're talking about McDonald's replacing employees with iPads then there's a hundred reasons why the iPad is better, especially in concert with a machine making the food. But here's a robot you might not have thought of, the robot that already does the inventory, ordering, pricing, labeling, and a million other retail tasks so that the Gap employee can be folding clothes: the cash register. When you bought something back in time a few decades, someone actually had to write that down or, more commonly, guess what was sold by how much money they took in and the understanding of their store sales. It is amazing now that most retail sales jobs essentially amount to making the sales floor presentable and customer service actions. These are also amazing machinery involved efficiency gains, and are mainly the type we will see in the future. Think of accounting and payroll and how many other jobs are already automated that we don't even have the wherewithal to understand, and you begin to see the scope of the transformation already in place. Another symptom of this is income inequality. The real problem is that eventually we will move past an economy where it is no longer possible for enough people to find work at all to support any kind of economy. The capital owners will literally own too much of the wealth. At that point society as a whole will have to completely change and abandon capitalism for some hybrid of socialism. Not to say that the government should own the means of production, but that we would basically all get some minimum share of the GDP in order to make the world work. There's no way around it.
Your example of the cash register is interesting. Planet money did an interesting story on this, the birth and death of the price tag. It starts with the CEO of Coke, who suggested adding a thermometer to the side of his coke machines to charge more on hot days. This flexible pricing got a huge degree of backlash from generations who were raised on fixed prices, but the reality is that those fixed prices are a result of your cash registers. Where once a store had to hire a clerk who knew the business, the volume of raw goods for the season, the numbers left in stock, the demand for the day, month, or year, the invention of the cash register allowed stores to hire the untrained who only had to enter in a pre-decided, nonnegotiable price. It's a great example of automation.
It's really odd how price elasticity is coming into fruition. A lesser known example is how hotwire and orbitz actually work called price stratification. The hotel knows that they can charge 180 per night for a given room. But they also know that there are people who will willingly pay 220 and not bat an eyelash. So they find out how those people book hotel rooms and let them pay 220 through that venue. Then they have the people who buy rooms at 180 and do the same. Finally they know that no matter what, there are some people who despite their need for a hotel room will simply not book a room at 180 a night. But they would fill the room at above cost if the room was a 'deal' or somehow impressive to them. So they sell that room through orbitz and they have a full hotel and a higher profit despite charging people different prices. Same with airlines, first class is for people who will pay for first class, not people with money.
A lot of people misunderstand what jobs are next to be automated. The service economy is safer than the support economy right now. It will be a long, long time before a robot (along with its maintenance) is cheaper than a burger-flipping high schooler. Instead, modern automation is focused on replacing tech support helplines, teams of customer service representatives, armies of paralegals. Tech support, legal discovery specialists, and translators are made redundant by new technology. They are more expensive than burger flippers, and the tech to replace them is much cheaper than burger-flipping machines. As it turns out, reading emails is a lot easier than folding towels.
Let's skip all the in betweens. AI and machines/robots are responsible for well over 90% of production and management of the Post Scarcity Economy, if it's still called 'economy'. Everything is produced in abundance at no cost. The advent of production from the atomic level will make it a cinch. Think The Replicator in Star Trek.