In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the effects of artificial intelligence and robots on humans. Some people have worried that humans will be marginalized to the point of being put out of work. Why hire a human when a much cheaper robot can do the job without being distracted? Of course, we can never be sure about the future. But a look at technological revolutions in the past should make us more optimistic than pessimistic about the fate of human labor in the age of AI.

Fortunately, there’s a way to satisfy this yearning—with technology. Specifically, far from taking away from our livelihoods, robots will actually give us more by increasing real output and real GDP. That’s the whole point. If they didn’t increase output, we wouldn’t value them. The key to economic growth is increased productivity—producing more and more output with more and more efficient means. The usual way to do that is to increase the amount of capital per worker: more capital per worker makes workers more productive.

As robots become more common and displace some people from their current jobs, is there any role for government policy? Yes. The government should not make it harder for people to find new jobs. So, for example, it should start tearing down government barriers such as licensing laws that make it difficult for people to enter as many as 800 occupations in the United States. And the higher minimum wages that many people are advocating now would make it even harder for less skilled people to find new jobs and acquire skills. Indeed, higher minimum wages would artificially hasten the move to robots.

Read the source article at Hoover Institution