Pew has an update on activities that might be automated in the near to medium term. Covid might be speeding this up – there’s not much hard evidence offered in this article, but one expert interviewed said he thinks it has been accelerated by five years. Sadly, the articles does not contain any videos of robots at work, which are always fun.

• taking orders in restaurants – seems like a no-brainer, most of us have probably done this
• flipping burgers – I haven’t seen this yet
• delivering meals and towels in hotels and hospitals – The first place I saw this was a hospital in Singapore. I played a (very low speed) game of chicken with the robot. The robot won – or I won, if winning means walking away with all my limbs. It was a children’s hospital so if I lost a limb I would have had to go to a different hospital.
• cleaning hospital rooms – I’d really like to see this one! If they can clean hospital rooms, can they clean my house?
• welding in factories – I don’t spend much time in factories
• meatpacking – no, I haven’t seen a robot rip a chicken open but it seems like the kind of thing that makes sense for robots, if we are all going to continue ripping open and eating animals (which I do myself, and would be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t think we should continue doing this)
• “Jobs also could be automated for better-educated knowledge workers, including some computer programmers, medical assistants and sales professionals.” The logic here is a little tenuous – replacing travel and convention industry jobs with online meetings. I guess, but is that really the same job being automated, or is that just a job that went away? Did refrigerators “automate” the job of delivering blocks of ice to our homes? If you were the ice man (and now you no longer cometh – I couldn’t resist), I guess that distinction doesn’t matter much to you. Refrigerators do have to be designed, manufactured, delivered, maintained, repaired, and eventually recycled or disposed of, however.
• customer service – I think this is true, although the computers aren’t necessarily doing a good job and our expectations may have just been lowered to the point where we accept this.
• “low wage gigs in stores and restaurants” – When I was a teenager I checked out and bagged groceries. That job has been “automated” by making the customer do it themselves. So again, is eliminating customer service the equivalent of automating it, or do we just not remember what customer service was? Not that it was ever perfect.
• “low skill jobs in mining or factories” – I don’t spend much time in mines
• “department stores dropping off automated orders at the curb” – a couple years ago, I would have called the police if people were banging on my door and leaving things in front of my house at odd hours. Now it’s the norm.

You can see how all this could lead logically to the idea of a universal basic income. If automation is increasing the productivity of the economy as a whole, but displacing some workers, you can take a portion of new wealth created (this is called taxes) and redistribute it. Or you can set up a sovereign wealth fund and distribute dividends from it, while saving some of the money to redistribute on a future rainy day (you don’t need to do this if you can just print as much money as you want and people will accept it worldwide, but then again maybe you should be planning for a day when that will no longer be the case). Set the tax rate right and you can help everybody at least a little while maintaining the incentive to innovate. Or you can try to be more targeted and use the money for unemployment payments, education and training. This should all be a no-brainer, but the people making the profits don’t want to give up even a small share, and they have spent decades manufacturing a toxic anti-tax culture that makes this politically very hard to do.