It’s easy to get caught up in imagining the rosy future when we think about robots. It’s hard not to fantasize how it might be with robots everywhere, doing everything, our cities practically running themselves, our lives evolving into perfect utopias in which we’ll pursue our own interests, play sports, travel the world, paint pictures and compose new haikus every beautiful morning as we wake up in our perfect, automated homes. But beware: it’s a mirage; an echo of a potential future, but separated from us by a vast desert of pitfalls and unknowns.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how, exactly, our lives are going to evolve and what the enormous, sweeping changes that will arise to deal with it all will look like. But it’s important to remember that these changes – revolutions, if you like — don’t happen overnight. As taken as we are with looking forward and imagining sensational extremes, every vision of the future is at the end of many small, painstaking steps, each one lavished with benefits tangled with opposing challenges and compromises.

Technology is phenomenal at solving (or having the real potential to soon solve) problems – some very big ones like climate change, disease, transport, space, over-population, famine, finite resources, etc. What it’s also unfortunately particularly good at doing is a huge amount of what humans do; our jobs, for example. And this is the age-old problem. It can do the jobs better, faster, more efficiently, more reliably, for less money (in the long term) and with far less complaining (and benefits, holidays, maternity leave, etc). But we need jobs. We need them for the income and also, arguably, for social/emotional and other self-actualizing reasons.

The many graphs that demonstrate how technology is whirling out of control along exponential trajectories in so many complementary fields seems to suggest that, within the next decade or two, we are on course to not only shift but completely destroy certain economic and social paradigms that have existed for many centuries. But the onslaught of automation and robots to our economy will be met at every level with opposition, for it depletes the number of current jobs on the market. And crucially, it seems likely that it will soon happen so quickly that replacement jobs that might be brought about by such technological advances are not accessible to us. Humans take time to retrain and educate. No exponential graphs for us.

So what is most likely to happen over the next twenty years? What happens when workers start to lose their jobs en masse to automation, workers in fields currently most at risk such as fast-food, generic sales positions and transport? The majority of roles within these are automatable – or certainly many aspects of the roles — which would suggest that millions of workers (and thus consumers and voters) are likely to be some of the first victims of the latest tides of technology.

What happens when, for example, a man loses his job as a taxi driver due to self-drive technology? Or the role working in a factory is taken by a new warehouse robot. No longer able to earn, it’s a frantic scramble to go about trying to replace this income stream — and survive in the meantime. Imagine what the thousands of people like this (millions, potentially) are likely to resort to:

• Cutting spending in extreme ways, immediately. A hopeful strategy that buys a little time to find a new role, but it’s short-term. Pooling resources and moving in with other families might seem another logical way to mitigate the drop in income but, again, this is a time-buyer that relies on some people having good jobs, as well as the vague hope that jobs will again be available in the future. Any loans taken out to buy time are drastic options that will only exacerbate the situation further.
• Education. Although a seemingly obvious strategy, this option seems high-risk as it requires significant funds (the lack of which is the current problem), and any jobs that a human is able to train for in a relatively short amount of time seem likely to be easily automated at some stage in the short-term future leaving the human jobless again and in deeper debt. The jobs that computers won’t be able to vie for any time soon are likely to be expensive, time-consuming, difficult and highly-specialized – and in fields that most people in this predicament probably won’t have significant exposure or access to.
• Protests and Union Mobilization. This is not generally a productive resort, but lacking anything else to do, it’s a course of action that at least voices frustration for the jobless. It seems highly unlikely to stimulate any immediate flow of jobs, and indeed, demands for higher wages, benefits and job security may force businesses toward automation rather than away from it. Unions will swell quickly (particularly as a number of entire industries become ‘at risk’) and are certain to bring about substantial resistance. Bearing in mind the time it will take for new technologies to be developed, introduced, installed and perfected, it offers enough time for them to organize, plan and implement significant opposition in the form of strikes which will undoubtedly hit the economy — and society — hard. It is also sadly inevitable that the ensuing desperate times will see a dramatic spike in crime and general mayhem.
• Votes. Whether unions can sway matters or not, the availability of thousands – millions – of votes for political factions that take anti-tech and protectionist stances will surely galvanize them into feverish action as this new flashpoint takes prominence above all others on the political stage.
• Welfare. This is the most obvious and inevitable resort for the growing hordes of ‘technologically unemployed’. The danger is that, with technology and automation progressing at the rate that they are, this will turn from a short-term stopgap to a long-term dependency as the ability to enter the job market is stifled by financial hurdles and the lack of education and skills – as well as viable ‘human’ jobs. And this presents governments – and the economy as a whole – with a dire pandora’s box to tackle. Not only does every person who takes up welfare begin to drain the government’s piggy-bank, but it’s a double-blow as the same people are consumers, relied on to do their part in contributing to a healthy, functioning economy - and thus the piggy-bank.

Technology is all very well with its tantalizing prospects of solving so many of the enormous problems we face, but its advancement is built on the building blocks of a solid economy. It is particularly good at augmenting the ‘supply’ side of the equation, but what appears to be its Achilles’ heel is its destructive effect on ‘demand’. Being able to do a job better than a human and boosting productivity and profits of a business is impressive, but when enough of the labor force are driven out of jobs and stop acting as consumers, the fuels that technology needs – namely investment and anticipated demand – will dry up and choke it, the delicate balance lost.

In the past, the ‘Luddite Fallacy’ response derided the hysterical ‘crying wolf’ every time technology got a foot-hold into the job market, arguing that new jobs were always created on the back of advancements in technologies, leaving us better off as a whole every time. But technology then was advancing far slower and in tiny isolated bursts, whereas now, new technologies are accelerating exponentially in power and application around the world. They are feeding off each other and growing in complexity at such a rate that a tipping point is surely approaching (assuming demand and the economy remain robust): a threshold beyond which our ability to retrain is too slow, too expensive and too limited to match whatever unforeseen jobs evolve out of these new technologies. Our ability to be productive, to participate in the economy, is in all likelihood going to be strangled as more effective non-human workers are developed quicker than we can possibly keep up. The wolf is very much at the door.

We have many pieces of many puzzles in place. Scarily so. Sensors, moveable limbs, mobility and programming are all incredibly advanced. The fields of A.I. and Machine Learning in particular are blooming like great nuclear mushrooms as we head towards 2020. We can program robots to do more and more complex things, and even learn from what they do, adapting as they go along. We’re training them to be workers, training them to do what we can do. Our replacements. And we’re only just starting to realize the slippery slope we’re on.

So what options do we have in dealing with this probable event horizon?

Politics will no doubt have sway in blocking technological advancements to some extent; there are simply too many votes to win for there not to be a sudden rise in popularity of some anti-tech, pro-human, protectionist parties. How this would interweave with the need for new technologies that boost business and solve our bigger problems is yet to be seen. As with the UK miners who battled Thatcher’s attempts to make the mines more technologically advanced and implementing severe job cuts, it seems likely that there will be a sustained period of enormous unrest; but, inevitably, the benefits of technology and the need for a profitable business model will surely win out against the need for obsolete jobs. How many people still work tilling the field or using typewriters? Protectionism can’t work in the long term and will usher in the very thing that it is trying to prevent. Economically unviable roles maintained purely to provide work for someone will scupper that business and pull it under. And the resultant job losses won’t be something one can complain about or prevent with action; a business that cannot operate successfully can’t be merely ‘protested’ back into profitability.

Retraining and Higher Education have traditionally been the stepping stones to climb out of reach of the claws of technological unemployment, but this is costly for a government with dwindling streams of tax, and it’s also no guarantee of future jobs – particularly when you bear in mind how far technology is able to advance in a single year as compared to a standard four year degree for a human to gain even a basic foothold in a new, complex and relevant field.

A possible, perhaps probable, option in the long term is a revision of how our basic economy functions. Businesses need to thrive and make money, consumers need to buy, and that recycling of money — the lifeblood of the economy — must find its way into the hands of the consumers. Perhaps we need to shed our conviction that jobs are the only way forward – particularly if we continue inventing machines and software that can do it all better than us. If this income distribution is to be through welfare (which is a certainty in the short-term, at least), then perhaps it’s logical that the government must take more money from business owners through higher taxes and deliver this into the hands of consumers who can then spend it and keep the businesses and economy alive. It seems likely, too, that the welfare system would have to undergo an even more drastic change in implementing incentives that are socially and environmentally responsible for which the consumers can strive, offering opportunities to earn unequal but not unfair incomes. Growing inequality between those who have jobs and those who don’t will be a prickly problem to deal with, to say the least.

Whether this will happen in the next ten years, twenty years or even fifty years, will depend greatly on how potent the opposition is from the newly jobless and the suffocating effect the technological unemployment and its ramifications will have on the economy. It will depend on how governments react and what legislation and regulations are brought in to retard the advances of technology being assimilated into the workplace — or even hastening its adoption.

What’s for sure is that the relentless waves of technology will crash forward and, as history has taught us, the desperate barriers we try to put up can only resist for so long. But us humans need a means to survive, and in economic terms, a financial means to consume. How that works, and how quickly and painlessly we can transform such a fundamental cornerstone of our way of life, remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that the time for consideration and meaningful debate is now, before we find ourselves floundering in the thick of it as we watch our technological Frankenstein arise, take the reins from our obsolete hands, and outpace us into the future.