When a robot takes your job

AS A teenager in Britain, one of the few television programmes that was a viewing fixture for me was Tomorrow's World. Every week, it looked at innovations that promised to change how human beings would live in years to come. Normally, its optimistic view of the impact of technological change seemed to make sense, but I clearly recall instantly disagreeing with one statement made by the presenter. He said that with the advances being made in labour-saving technology, one problem that we would have in the future would be how to use our extra leisure time. "But that's not how it works!" I thought.

Years later, in the early 1980s, I visited a car plant where robots were just then being introduced. I watched as what looked like a pair of giant mechanical hands folded around a car body. Multiple welds were executed in a flash (literally), and then the hands drew back, and the car moved on. A union representative who was showing me around said: "It used to take 20 men to do that." He hardly needed to tell me. I could see those men standing around, gloomily, no doubt well aware that their jobs and many others were about to disappear. That was indeed what happened - they faced unpaid, enforced "leisure time".

The expression "labour saving technology" would seem to imply that those who use it will be able to be at least as productive as they were before its introduction while working shorter hours and labouring less intensively, presumably without loss of income. And why not? If a plant that produced 200,000 cars in a year with 10,000 workers introduced technology that allowed it to achieve the same production level with 2,000 workers, could that not logically mean that the company might sell the cars for the same price as before, pay the workers the same wages as before, and only ask each worker to labour for a fifth of time he had previously?