Algorithms replacing workers and upending industries wouldn’t be so frightening provided we had some political solution to reconcile a free-market economy and an automated one should not enough new industries bloom to keep wealth from being even more unevenly distributed. But political solutions aren’t our forte right now. I think Steven Rattner, who did yeoman’s work during the auto bailout, is far too optimistic about the labor market, at least during this painful, transitional period, but he believes the Information Age will play out the same way as the Industrial Age. From “Fear Not the Coming Age of Robots,” his op-ed piece at the New York Times:

“Call it automation, call it robots, or call it technology; it all comes down to the concept of producing more with fewer workers. Far from being a scary prospect, that’s a good thing.

Becoming more efficient (what economists call ‘productivity’) has always been central to a growing economy. Without higher productivity, wages can’t go up and standards of living can’t improve.

That’s why, in the sweep of history, the human condition barely improved for centuries, until the early days of the industrial revolution, when transformational new technologies (the robots of their day) were introduced.

Consider the case of agriculture, after the arrival of tractors, combines and scientific farming methods. A century ago, about 30 percent of Americans labored on farms; today, the United States is the world’s biggest exporter of agricultural products, even though the sector employs just 2 percent of Americans.

The trick is not to protect old jobs, as the Luddites who endeavored to smash all machinery sought to do, but to create new ones. And since the invention of the wheel, that’s what has occurred.

When was the last time you talked to a telephone operator? And yet if rotary dial telephones hadn’t been invented, millions of Americans would currently be wastefully employed saying “Central” every time someone picked up a telephone receiver. More recently but similarly, the Internet has rendered human directory assistance nearly extinct.

Of course, I can’t prove that the impact of some new wave of technological innovation won’t ever upend thousands of years of history. But it hasn’t happened yet.”