Danny Crichton’s essay “Fear Not the Robot” (May 4) is optimistic about robots, but even more optimistic about a basic law of economics: Jobs are created by the money to pay for them. Robots generate productivity, productivity translates into money, and money creates jobs. We don’t have to worry about what kinds of jobs or how much they may or may not pay. We may assume robots will create low-paying jobs, but the price of jobs is determined mainly by social convention rather than by their presumed productivity. Robots are not consumers of anything except the energy to run them (and of course the labor to build them and repair them), so the productivity they create has to go into jobs for consumers.
Even if robots do create low-paying jobs, at some point they will generate more jobs than there are workers to fill them. Competition for scarce labor will then raise wages — no matter what the jobs are. And we don’t even have to be able to imagine them. We have always been creating unimaginable jobs.
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