Yesterday I read a question on Reddit which (mostly) boiled down to “What will happen to the economy as robots become advanced enough to do all the work?” Since I wrote some words, I thought I’d cross-post them here, mostly for posterity.

This is an interesting question, and one that I think speaks to modern concerns about trends in automation. I’m going to make some guesses, but of course we always must remember that the future is hard to predict, etc. etc. For simplicity, I’ll speak of my ideas as absolute, but it’s also a good idea to remember to imagine a host of possible futures, rather than put all weight on just one.

In the next couple decades robotics will change everything in the same way that in the last couple decades computers changed everything. Right now it’s profitable to replace assembly-line workers with robots, as FoxCon is doing in China. In the next few years it’ll start to become profitable to replace waiters, fruit pickers, and eventually taxi drivers with robots. In time, as interest in robotics funnels capital into robotics R&D, we’ll start to see widespread use of robotic cooks, janitors, construction workers, and package deliverers.

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