Paper's abstract

Gilles Saint-Paul, Robots: Toward the End of Work?
Economic history teaches us that if technical progress does not benefit all workers when it appears, in the long term it is the main factor in the extraordinary rise of wages and living standards that the world economy has experienced since the industrial revolution. However, advances in robotics may well question this optimism and vindicate the Cassandras who prophesied the end of work. Indeed, the scope of these technologies continues to grow, to the point where all of the tasks performed by humans are potentially robotisable. If this is true, economy and society would be deeply transformed. Five scenarios are considered. In three of them, a quasi-idle human class enjoys higher standards of living through transfers from the production carried out by robots. These transfers can be made through the welfare State, a clientelist system implemented by a robot-owning oligarchy, or the preservation by large firms of highly paid service jobs, whose main role would be to sustain high living standards and a large market base for the mass-produced goods produced by the robots. In the absence of redistributive mechanisms, I consider two other scenarios. Under the Malthusian scenario, wages fall below subsistence levels and the world population falls. Only a class of annuitants who own robots survives. According to this virtual scenario, the living wage itself drops considerably under the influence of new technologies, allowing for the working population to survive despite lower wages.

Key Words : automation robot work
t. 59, 2017: p. 249-261

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