around the world.
Albus sees this wealth being generated by an evergrowing number of robot workers. (Actually, the term “robot workers” is a redundancy. Robot is from a Czech word that means worker. The term was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play, R.U.R.) Today’s workforce of some 6000 robots is growing at a rate of about thirty-five percent per year. By the end of this decade, Albus and other robot experts see at least 100,000 robots in the United States, growing to a million by the turn of the century.
What does this mean to the twenty-or thirty-year-old human worker of today? It means unemployment, somewhere in the future, whether you like it or not.
“My guess,” says Albus, “is that they might get to retire a little earlier than they otherwise would. I don’t think anybody would be terribly upset about retiring at fifty-five instead of sixty-five.”
Living on a fixed retirement income for ten years longer than today’s pensioners? Sitting at home with nothing to do while the robots busily clank around your former workplace? That can be bad enough, but what about the people who have already been pushed into unemployment— not retirement—by robots and automation? Labor experts talk about the “structurally unemployed,” the people who will most likely never be rehired because they haven’t the skills to compete in the labor market and will not or cannot be retrained. They see a hard core of six and a half percent of the total human workforce as structurally (read, permanently) unemployed today. That’s more than six million men and women. And the number is expected to grow, not shrink.
How much wealth must the robots generate merely to absorb the unemployment they will be helping to cause? How can we dream of a robot-produced Utopia where no one is hungry or poor, when the earliest impact of robotics seems to mean wide-scale unemployment for humans?
But there is unemployment and unemployment, as a philosopher would say. If you drink in the corner saloon at ten in the morning you’re considered a bum; but if you drink at ten a.m. in the country club, you’re a golfer. The difference between the two is wealth. If the robots are going to generate so much wealth, how can society be arranged so that the workers dis-employed by robots get their fair share of the money?
Albus has been pondering this matter for as long as he has been designing robots, and has written books on the subject, including People’s Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution. “The primary mechanism for transferring wealth,” he says without hesitation, “is ownership.”
One of the ways in which employees can begin to own the robots which displace them is through Employee Stock Ownership Plans: ESOPs. Economist Louis O. Kelso, author (with Mortimer J. Adler) of The Capitalist Manifesto and Finishing the Unfinished Capitalist Revolution, hit upon the idea in the 1950s of having companies issue shares of their own stock to their employees as a kind of fringe benefit, an addition to or replacement for bonuses or retirement plans. Many companies have since started ESOPs, and some firms have even become totally owned by their employees. Albus believes that an ESOP-type plan could permit employees to attain ownership of a highly-automated firm, and thus gain a share of the profits generated by the robots.
Looking further into the future, Albus believes that the best way to handle the economic impact of the Second Industrial Revolution is for the government to create a National Mutual Fund.
Every citizen would be a shareholder in the NMF, receiving a share at age eighteen, by virtue of being an American citizen. The NMF would not obtain its investment funds directly from its shareholders, however. Instead, it would borrow investment capital from the Federal Reserve Bank. The amount borrowed would be huge, billions of dollars per year. Congress would have to decide on a ceiling, just as Congress now
Albus sees this wealth being generated by an evergrowing number of robot workers. (Actually, the term “robot workers” is a redundancy. Robot is from a Czech word that means worker. The term was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play, R.U.R.) Today’s workforce of some 6000 robots is growing at a rate of about thirty-five percent per year. By the end of this decade, Albus and other robot experts see at least 100,000 robots in the United States, growing to a million by the turn of the century.
What does this mean to the twenty-or thirty-year-old human worker of today? It means unemployment, somewhere in the future, whether you like it or not.
“My guess,” says Albus, “is that they might get to retire a little earlier than they otherwise would. I don’t think anybody would be terribly upset about retiring at fifty-five instead of sixty-five.”
Living on a fixed retirement income for ten years longer than today’s pensioners? Sitting at home with nothing to do while the robots busily clank around your former workplace? That can be bad enough, but what about the people who have already been pushed into unemployment— not retirement—by robots and automation? Labor experts talk about the “structurally unemployed,” the people who will most likely never be rehired because they haven’t the skills to compete in the labor market and will not or cannot be retrained. They see a hard core of six and a half percent of the total human workforce as structurally (read, permanently) unemployed today. That’s more than six million men and women. And the number is expected to grow, not shrink.
How much wealth must the robots generate merely to absorb the unemployment they will be helping to cause? How can we dream of a robot-produced Utopia where no one is hungry or poor, when the earliest impact of robotics seems to mean wide-scale unemployment for humans?
But there is unemployment and unemployment, as a philosopher would say. If you drink in the corner saloon at ten in the morning you’re considered a bum; but if you drink at ten a.m. in the country club, you’re a golfer. The difference between the two is wealth. If the robots are going to generate so much wealth, how can society be arranged so that the workers dis-employed by robots get their fair share of the money?
Albus has been pondering this matter for as long as he has been designing robots, and has written books on the subject, including People’s Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution. “The primary mechanism for transferring wealth,” he says without hesitation, “is ownership.”
One of the ways in which employees can begin to own the robots which displace them is through Employee Stock Ownership Plans: ESOPs. Economist Louis O. Kelso, author (with Mortimer J. Adler) of The Capitalist Manifesto and Finishing the Unfinished Capitalist Revolution, hit upon the idea in the 1950s of having companies issue shares of their own stock to their employees as a kind of fringe benefit, an addition to or replacement for bonuses or retirement plans. Many companies have since started ESOPs, and some firms have even become totally owned by their employees. Albus believes that an ESOP-type plan could permit employees to attain ownership of a highly-automated firm, and thus gain a share of the profits generated by the robots.
Looking further into the future, Albus believes that the best way to handle the economic impact of the Second Industrial Revolution is for the government to create a National Mutual Fund.
Every citizen would be a shareholder in the NMF, receiving a share at age eighteen, by virtue of being an American citizen. The NMF would not obtain its investment funds directly from its shareholders, however. Instead, it would borrow investment capital from the Federal Reserve Bank. The amount borrowed would be huge, billions of dollars per year. Congress would have to decide on a ceiling, just as Congress now
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