It’s not a done deal that automation is going to create a troubling amount of technological unemployment, but that scenario has to be considered a real possibility. What then? Will we have endless down time to do more free work for multibillion-dollar corporations? From Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times:

Economic growth, even where it looks impressive, seems to be creating fewer jobs than in the past, and for the most part, poorly paid ones. The main metrics for economic success now appear to be decoupling from labor markets, the main source of income and meaning for citizens.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, underlined the point last week at a London conference on the future of work. “The share of labor in the economy is collapsing, and that will continue,” he said.

Some speak of a third industrial revolution; others call it the second machine age. With the processing speed of computers doubling roughly every 18 months and machines becoming ever smarter, paid work for human beings could become a lot scarcer — and soon.

Forty-seven percent of all employment in the United States is susceptible to automation over the next two decades, according to a study by Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael A. Osborne, an associate professor of machine learning, at the University of Oxford.

It is not just truck drivers and tax preparers who risk losing their jobs, economists say. Robots can pick strawberries, distinguishing the ripe ones by taking hundreds of digital photographs a second, and algorithms apparently make more objective court decisions than human judges, who according to a study in Israel are more lenient after a food break.

This hyperdigital age is also creating some new jobs for humans. Among the 10 fastest-growing job descriptions identified by Dr. Frey were big data architect and iOS developer. But over all, he said, “It seems that job creation is not going to keep pace with automation.”•