Via Gawker:
The biggest near term threat to the stability of nations might not be climate change, terrorism, or nuclear war. It just might be robots—putting millions of people out of jobs. Where will they all go? There are only a few possibilities.
The widespread automation of jobs—millions and millions of jobs—is not a sci-fi theory, or just another marginal step in the normal evolution of human employment. It is a result of the advancement of computers and technology that could fundamentally throw our labor economy out of whack.
Billionaires in Silicon Valley and Mike Bloomberg and labor unions across the world all agree that we need a plan. The problem is that we may see so many jobs being automated out of existence that there is no clear place for all the people whose jobs have been eliminated to go.
The fast food workers and bank tellers and truck drivers 60,000 Foxconn workers being replaced with robots and touchscreens and driverless cars will not see equally obtainable employment in sufficient quantity pop up elsewhere. This is not just a cyclical change, which calls for newly unemployed workers to simply retrain and go into another field; it’s possible that automation will just eliminate a huge swath of jobs for good. And that is where the trouble starts.