This is a bit of a capsule summary of better, longer pieces, and a bit hyperbolic. The policy brief is better and is still an easy read: http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd...
The thing that always scares me reading any of those "X% of workers losing their jobs to automation" stories is thinking about what proportion of the (100-X)% of workers have jobs that (to a lesser or greater extent) depend on the idea that the X% are employed and have surplus income to spend.
Robots can only reduce costs of the production, but to earn any money corporations first need to be able to sell their products to someone, they need consumers. And you can't have starving, homeless consumers. You need to come up with some jobs so that majority of people still can earn money every month, so that you can sell them things regularly and finance all those fancy robots with a stable cash flow. Without that the whole economy as we know it would break. Not to mention that there would be a revolution or something long before that point. Transition, of course, will not be nice to many currently poor and unskilled workers, they'll be victims of the progress and this will continue for the few next generations for sure. But it's just a transition, jobs will eventually shift to something new, as they did before.
UN report authors don't understand economics.
If robots ever get cheap enough to replace sweatshop labor, that will mean a substantial increase in the number of people in the developing world that will be able to afford these robots. The same way smartphones were only found in the developed world a decade ago, and now are owned by over two billion people in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people in the developing world will be able to afford robots if prices come down enough.
This will profoundly increase the number of businesses that people in the developing world will be able to operate, and improve the quality of life of the average person there.
The article casually mentions universal basic income (UBI) as a possible solution, but it's not, at least not for this issue.
It is plausible to implement UBI (assuming political will to do so, which is debatable in most places) or some other wealth transfer solution in an advanced, wealthy technological society, where you tax the mostly automated production of goods and services to provide basic needs for all those people who are not necessary for economic production; even as the math of UBI doesn't IMHO really work out right now yet, it's plausible that it will in the coming decades with growing automated productivity and all those people becoming actually economically unnecessary. Especially with the re-shoring discussed in the article moving lots of production capacity back to developed countries, reversing globalization and international integration, making them more self-sufficient.
However, it seems quite implausible that this re-shoring will result in the developed world funding an UBI for these two thirds of all workers in the developing world. I don't see the political will being there for at least a generation if not much more - there will be painful debates about doing UBI for their own people, where in addition to moral imperative and nationalism you also have a practical reason for the elites and producers to spend a small fraction of their wealth for 'bread and circuses' to ensure local social stability around their homes; but any proposals to do the same for the whole world simply won't fly.
It seems far more believable that these countries will rather choose to invest some resources in "building a wall", literally or metaphorically. Currently, importing labor is economically useful for many developed countries for demographic reasons; but as labor becomes useless, we can expect them to follow their interests and restrict migration even as the desire for migration grows.
Technology wlll replace 90% of All Workers in the US (mid. 1800s)
Foxconn plans to replace most of their workers with robots in the next few years. They already replaced 40,000 humans.
Since this is inevitable by most opinions the real question should be how do we increase the number of jobs by 66%
Lol, do they mention that new jobs will be developed?
Humans are incredibly creative, and will find a way to adapt.
Triggering mass immigration.
That's timely.
I just had a discussion with the taxi driver on the way to the airport here in southwest China about education. He seemed to be suggesting that, given I spoke Mandarin and English, I would be well-regarded as a teacher. I had to explain that the type of thing I do is not really available in the syllabus of universities or schools in China, and that while I'd investigated opening one the government policy made it a prohibitively difficult and unstable proposition to run a non-standard syllabus. I arrived at the airport, and had a 10 minute wait to get in the door, because people were employed to manually wave an explosives-detection wand over everyone's bag. Entering the main hall, the flights display did not have my flight listed. I asked a nearby shiny sash-wearing airport employee what was up. She directed me to the right place immediately. Evidently, nobody had bothered to update the computer.
The manual-only (despite the zero luggage encouraged nature of the airline) check-in wasn't yet opened, so I went up to the F&B level, where I met some Nepalis en-route back to Kathmandu from studying computing in Korea who needed to change money to eat and couldn't, because the manual change bureaus weren't open. I then had a ridiculously bad meal ordered from a place where the lights were only half functional where neither the table nor environment were properly cleaned. During the meal, manual cleaners and their trolleys wafted about the dining area without urgency. After the meal I opened my laptop and had to go through a dated SMS code-sending procedure to get on the airport wifi.
Robots and automation would have improved the experience on so many levels, but I don't want the world to turn in to a shiny fascist utopia like Singapore. I'm literally on the way to the Pearl River Delta (Hong Kong/Shenzhen) on a project to build food-making robots - http://infinite-food.com/ - but the human question is a strong one and it unsettles me. In a wholly automated future, where is the sense of worth going to come from for the average citizen? Where does it come from now?
Somehow, after witnessing the miracle of transformation that is modern China (I've spent most of my adult life here), I can only believe that the human spirit will find a way, at least in this society. After all, on the grand scale of things, if we're all fed, clothed, housed, but simply bored... it's not a bad problem to have: onward to robotic noodles!