“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman famously said, in 1983, of the motion-picture industry. I wonder if that analysis remains true.

Hollywood still manufactures bombs, but very few of the tentpoles tank now. There aren’t as many hunches played, which makes the business more stagnant creatively, but most of the big bets come in. More advanced research and marketing and analytics and promotion has made it so, since the artistic merits of comic-book spectaculars are wildly inconsistent. 

Can this new reality of film economics be applied to the wider economy? Not exactly, since there are way more variables in play. Black swans will still smack us in the back of the head. A huge meltdown can delay the inevitable–or jump-start it early. But some things are good bets. It seems pretty clear now that there’ll be a major transition in Labor over the rest of this century. Either many jobs–entire industries, actually–disappear and are replaced by ones we’ve yet to imagine, or they vanish and aren’t replaced in the numbers necessary. Although this upheaval is upon us, it would seem politicians in this year’s American Presidential campaign–and the electorate–aren’t aware that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back and more professions than they might imagine are going away.

From Sam Becker at Cheat Sheet, the world’s worst-designed website:

Social scientists and economists are getting pretty good at reading the tea leaves from available data. When it comes to forecasting future trends in employment and business, we generally have an idea of where things things are headed. Though there are big, unexpected events that occur and throw everything into flux, we can mostly plot out humanity’s course, on a macro level, over the next several decades.

Unfortunately, for a good portion of the world’s poor and working classes, it doesn’t look too good – even though we’re living in a time of unprecedented wealth and technological innovation. That innovation will ultimately replace workers in droves, and some large-scale economic policy shifts are going to be needed to sort things out.

 

But even as we face the prospect of increasing automation, and fewer employment opportunities, most American workers remain confident – perhaps too confident. A look at some new numbers from Pew Research Center shows that worker sentiment toward the future speaks not just to inflated confidence, but perhaps a sense of denial.

The Pew brief cites a 2013 study from Oxford University, which says that as much as 47% of American jobs are subject to automation in the near future. In other words, as much as half of the American work force may be facing a serious employment crisis, and we’re really doing nothing about it. Using that as a starting point, Pew surveyed Americans to drill further down into this dilemma, and see how Americans feel about the unnerving prospect of mass automation.

As expected, a majority (two-thirds) do expect that within 50 years, robots and computers will take over most of the menial work from human employees. But – and here’s the big hang-up – a majority of workers also think that their own specific professions or jobs won’t be impacted.•

Foxconn is investing massively in one million robots, hoping to remove from its factories much of the pesky human element, that thing which has caused it so much consternation, and other corporations which have relied on cheap Asian labor are following suit. What are the ramifications for the individual laborer and the global economy? From Sam Becker at Business Cheat Sheet:

“You can’t really blame companies like Nike or Foxconn for what they’re doing — after all, they’re businesses, and their job is to turn a profit for shareholders and the company’s owners. That’s why they exist. They do not exist to supply jobs. However, the jobs that big companies like these do add to the economy are immensely important to the integrity of society as a whole.

So what happens when they start to disappear? Obviously, these disappearing positions will have a giant economic effect on developing nations, particularly countries that have been used for cheap labor over the past few decades. Many of the world’s struggling nations that depend on large influxes of capital investment and jobs from American and European companies are going to face some tough situations as automation continues to spread, as they have built their economic backbone as popular choices for companies looking to outsource.

It looks like the other shoe is about to drop, and they will now experience the same situation many Americans were faced with a decade or two before them. The question is, what will the ultimate fallout from that be? We’re talking about the possibility of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of workers losing their jobs over the next two decades, if things continue to pick up.

While we have always heard of a future in which robots would be handling most of the labor, it’s hard to think that most people pictured it in the way that things seem to be heading. Sure, automated work forces will be handling many of the world’s tasks in a relatively short amount of time, ushering in a new era of prosperity and leisure for the masses. The problem is that that prosperity hasn’t been shared, and many of the world’s poor and middle classes will end up scrambling to make ends meet as a result.

It’s unclear what the endgame of this dramatic shift from human labor to automation will be, but it’s clear that we are in the early stages of it. What policymakers and economists will need to do is to figure out how the vast majority of the planet’s masses will care for themselves if there is suddenly a huge shortage of work and opportunity.“