With this reasoning US economist David Autor began his speech at the TEDxCambridge 2016 conference.
His TED talk entitled Will automation take away all our jobs? brought surprising findings about the future of work.
Autor is one of the world's leading experts on labour economics. He is currently head of the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"Why are there so many jobs? There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake. One has to do with human genius and creativity. The other has to do with human insatiability, or greed, if you like," Autor explains.
Technology increases the importance of human judgment and creativity
The first economic principle describes how automating some parts of work does not mean the remaining abilities required to perform the work are unnecessary: on the contrary, they become more important and have a greater economic value.
For example, ATMs nowadays are able to manipulate money faster and better than human treasurers. Treasurers, however, have not been replaced by ATMs: automation has increased the importance of their ability to solve problems and customer relations.
We want more and more
The second, parallelly functioning economic principle is in the invention of new ideas, products and services that dominate our attention, take up our time and lead us to consume.
People long for all these new possibilities and are willing to work hard to achieve them. Even though we have achieved material abundance, our perception of scarcity has never disappeared.
Polarised labour market
Thanks to automation, we can do more work in less time. The problem, according to Autor, is not that jobs are vanishing.
"The challenge is that many of those jobs are not good jobs, and many citizens cannot qualify for the good jobs that are being created," he says.
On the one hand, there is a group of high-paid and educated professionals with interesting jobs. On the other hand, there is a large number of people in low-paid positions who care about the comfort and health of the rich.
It's up to us
Autor stresses the importance of institutions, especially schools, in showing how we exploit technological development in order to flourish.
Neither machines nor markets define the future; we and our institutions define it. We have faced similar economic changes in the past and we were successful.
TED Talk
Autor's entire video is available here (in English with subtitles in other languages). A transcript in English and other languages is here.
-kk-