At the Forbes site, John Tamny, author of the forthcoming pop culture-saturated book Popular Economics argues that robots will be job creators, not killers, and breathlessly asserts that the Digital Revolution will follow the arc of the Industrial one. Perhaps. But there could be a very bumpy number of decades while that potential transition takes place. Although, as I’ve said before, you wouldn’t want to live in a country left behind in the race to greater AI.

But robots or no robots, here’s one job that should be created: someone to design a site for Forbes that isn’t a complete piece of shit. It’s really like Web 1.0 over there. The opening of Tamny’s reasoning:

As robots increasingly adopt human qualities, including those that allow them to replace actual human labor, economists are starting to worry.  As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, some “wonder if automation technology is near a tipping point, when machines finally master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable.”

The fears of economists, politicians and workers themselves are way overdone.  They should embrace the rise of robots precisely because they love job creation.  As my upcoming book Popular Economics points out with regularity, abundant job creation is always and everywhere the happy result of technological advances that tautologically lead to job destruction.

Robots will ultimately be the biggest job creators simply because aggressive automation will free us up to do new work by virtue of it erasing toil that was once essential.  Lest we forget, there was a time in American history when just about everyone worked whether they wanted to or not — on farms — just to survive.  Thank goodness technology destroyed lots of agricultural work that freed Americans up to pursue a wide range of vocations off the farm.

With their evolution as labor inputs, robots bring the promise of new forms of work that will have us marveling at labor we wasted in the past, and that will make past job destroyers like wind, water, the cotton gin, the car, the internet and the computer seem small by comparison.  All the previously mentioned advances made lots of work redundant, but far from forcing us into breadlines, the destruction of certain forms of work occurred alongside the creation of totally new ways to earn a living.  Robots promise a beautiful multiple of the same.•