When we say the disruption of labor is inevitable, we are making a forecast about what will happen that is grounded in economics. We are not making a judgement about what ought to happen. We are also emphatically saying that people and leaders should not sit back and let the disruption wash over them, they must take action.
Why do we judge the technology itself to be effectively unstoppable? Two reasons. The first is economics: once a form of labor arrives that is many times cheaper and more capable than the alternative, adoption follows, just as it did with electricity, the automobile, and the smartphone. The second is competition and global diffusion. The technology is being developed simultaneously across many companies and many countries, so no single firm or nation can veto it. Any actor that abstains does not stop the disruption, it simply hands the advantage to those who do not abstain.
Furthermore, the inevitability of the technology does not imply the inevitability of the outcome. Whether this disruption produces shared superabundance or social catastrophe is overwhelmingly a matter of choice, and that is the entire purpose of our work. So rather than shutting down debate, the framing is meant to move the debate off a question that is effectively settled, namely whether the technology will arrive, and onto the questions where we genuinely have agency and where everything is at stake – how the gains are distributed, how people are protected, and how dangerous applications are governed.
Whether the disruption should happen can still be debated as long as the goal is to determine how to regulate, steer, and in some cases ban specific applications, even where we cannot veto the disruption as a whole. The model here is the Montreal Protocol. The world could not un-invent CFCs, but the nations of the world chose to phase them out, and it worked, with the ozone layer now healing. You cannot always stop a technology, but you can govern its harms through collective choice. That is exactly the kind of debate and action we are calling for, whether on lethal autonomous weapons, on who controls the robots, or on how the prosperity is shared.
The technology is coming, the outcome is yours to shape, and the time to start shaping it is now.
In the span of just fifteen years, the working horse went from providing the vast majority of road travel to a tiny fraction of it. The automobile had arrived, and the fate of the horse was sealed. We are now on the cusp of a disruption every bit as swift and complete, except this time, we humans are the horses.
A convergence of sensors, computing, actuators, and batteries now gives humanoid robots the capability to perform both cognitive and physical work. AI is already taking on cognitive tasks once reserved for people, and humanoid robots are bringing the same capability to physical tasks. For the first time, the supply of available labor can expand as fast as machines can be built and trained. These systems are already approaching cost parity with human labor across much of the global economy, and their cost will keep falling while their capability keeps rising.
This is about far more than cheaper labor. Robots will create an entirely new and vastly larger labor system in which the marginal cost of labor approaches zero. The result will be a sweeping tide of falling costs, rising quality, and explosive productivity that forms the foundation of an era of superabundance. The nations, industries, and individuals who recognize this early, and who choose to protect people rather than jobs, will be best positioned to navigate the transformation and capture its extraordinary benefits.
Learn more about the disruption of labor and its implications for jobs, society, and the economy.