“Surplus humans.”
That’s the callous term Karl Fogel, partner at Open Tech Strategies, an open-source technology firm, used when describing the unwitting employee-victims of advances in automation. Cruelty aside, it’s a term that could easily describe once secure “middle-class” professions, including jobs in the automotive industry, nursing, tax preparing, office administration and law.
When I started reporting my book Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America five years ago, I found many culprits for rising insecurity among what I called the Middle Precariat, a group that suffered from the cost of their children’s daycare, and from rent and mortgages, of course, and copious student and health care debt. But they were also afflicted by the hovering fear of being put out of work by our mechanical brethren
While some techno apologists insist that robotization will produce new jobs to offset these losses, it is also understood that the wages of many of these jobs will be far from middle-class, and that pay is the real problem. Meanwhile, this current administration has done little in the face of automation and does not appear to have a plan to combat the dangers of the future.
So federal and local governments must try to retain the value of what I call “human infrastructure,” which is as crucial as other infrastructure that are always being praised in public speeches: highways, dams and bridges.
But first we need to know if the robots are coming for us.