Automation is going to take away a large portion of existing jobs, but not all at once. Some tasks will be reduced from each technological advancement, freeing workers up to get more done, ultimately leading to less need to maintain the same size of the workforce. We see it all the time; company lays off thousands and records record profits…
It takes roughly 4 years to retrain, whether that’s an undergraduate degree or an apprenticeship. I argue that if companies are recording profits, then they can afford to pay to retrain the individuals they abandoned, or simply keep them on payroll. Maybe this works as proposed, and people can get retrained, but it could also encourage companies to slow down on cutting jobs when they are doing well anyways.
This doesn’t even really address the argument for a universal basic income, I see it as separate, but I think it’s something that could appeal to both sides of the isle in terms of addressing the automation problem.
Obviously this would still require some clause to prevent mass layoffs the one year a company doesn’t record profits but I’m curious what peoples thoughts are. Where does this break? Is there a better solution?