If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not saying that we'll hit the Singularity and upload our brains into computers, but we might hit a sort of "economic singularity" where it no longer becomes economically viable to create new jobs. What happens then is very much up to our society to decide.
Economist Louis Kelso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kelso) was talking about many of these issues in the 1950's. He proposed the concepts behind Binary Economic Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_economics) which helped usher into law the Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). Whether or not you agree with it, it is certainly interesting to learn about. It isn't something that is widely taught.
"Kelso claimed that in a truly free market wages would tend to fall over time, with all the benefits of technological progress accruing to capital owners"
I've worked for three ESOPs and was curious about their history. Learning about Binary Economics has led me into an interest in alternative economic theories. There are sites and books dedicated to the subject, the following excerpt from the previously linked wikipedia page was the connection I had made, but really he was trying to solve problems related to measuring production with regards to automation. With the advent of the computer age, it was viewed as inevitable.
`Binary productiveness is distinctly different from the conventional economic concept of productivity. Binary productiveness attempts to quantify the proportion of output contributed by total labor input and total capital input respectively, Adding capital inputs to a production process increases labor productivity, but binary economic theory argues that it decreases labor productiveness (i.e. the proportion of the total output with the support of both labor and capital that the labor inputs could have produced alone). For example, if the invention of a shovel allows a laborer to dig a hole in quarter of the time it would take him without the spade, binary economists would consider 75% of the "productiveness" to come from the shovel and only 25% from the laborer.`
`Kelso used the concept of productiveness to support his theory of distributive justice, arguing that as capital increasingly substitutes for labor..."workers can legitimately claim from their aggregate labor only a decreasing percentage of total output", implying they would need to acquire capital holdings to maintain their level of income.`
and
`...Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm which has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith. It concerns the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productivity largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy (whose distributive principle is "to each according to his production") delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contributions through labor.`
That's hardly a point of comfort if the new jobs all tend to be subject to the laws of "extremistan" (which seems to be the case for most artistic/creative/high-level ventures):
If today you replaced half of the blue-collar jobs in our economy with jobs that had a 10% chance of paying 100x as much but a 90% chance of paying effectively nothing (10x the average productivity, woohoo) you would still have widespread starvation, revolution, and violence tomorrow.
But under our current economic system, what you can afford is tied to the value of the goods/services you produce. If we find ourselves in a future where 90% of the population produces nothing, then 90% of the population can afford nothing, no matter how cheap.
Obviously there is a utopian solution, where most goods and services are so cheap to produce, that most people have essentially free access to them.
What is worrying is the dystopian alternative (and probably inevitable adjustment period), where only a tiny fraction of the population is "valuable", and therefore has access to all the benefits of cheap automation, while the other 90% have no value (economically speaking).
We also tend to forget that we live in a sort of intellectual bubble. Just by being able to hold a highly technical job, you are probably already in the upper 90% percent of the intelligence spectrum. 80% of the world's population has an IQ of under 115; and half the world's population is under 100 and can barely grasp any form of abstract logical thinking.
If the vast majority of jobs in the future require high technical or intellectual aptitude, then the vast majority of the earth's population will be left with nothing to do.
I was pointing out what I think is often ignored in these conversations: that robots taking all the jobs means we have reached post scarcity. Between that potential future and where we are now there could be some serious problems as you suggest. I agree that the economy is shifting away from low skilled jobs towards high skill jobs and that does seem like a big problem for low skill people. I am slightly more optimistic than you because I think that the primary difference between low skilled people and high skilled people is not innate intelligence, but education and training.
"Incredibly cheap" is not a relevant metric. The relevant quantity is price/income. If income drops by 50% and price drops by 10%, the good has still effectively become almost twice as expensive.
Workers capacity to fill those desires for people with capital is limited though. At what point does the majority of un-capitaled humanity become irrelevant?
Is there any convincing data on this point? I know that it was an economist that uttered this theory, so I'll assume good faith when it comes to research effort or at least diligent argumentation on the behalf of this statement. But without anything to back it up, it just comes off as something it's proponents take for granted as a truism.
"Consumerism" (which goes beyond "stuff" and materialism, at least here) has been criticized by many in the western world. Even just leaving aside the argument that involves a finite planet sustaining ever-more needs and desires, I'm not convinced that the average human's needs and desires are infinite in any practical sense. It might be that "more is more", but I also suspect a sharp decline due to diminishing returns as one gets ever more needs fulfilled. How much better does spending 1,000 million on yourself feel than spending 100 million on yourself? Significantly better? I guess we could theoretically get to the point where everyone takes what is in today's currency billion-dollars worth of vacations by going on trips 'round the Solar System. But at some point, maybe before we're at the point of the Solar System joyrides, it just might not seem so exciting any more (travelling to the red wasteland of Mars might not be so exotic and exciting as it is today when a lot of people can and have already done it).
