Could machines phase out human brain power to the point of unemploying millions of people?
Easily. They don't need to be capable of replacing
everything to unemploy dozens of millions of people. A great deal of out "knowledge work" is easily automatable. For example, lawyers. The majority of legal work is not standing in a courtroom. It's legal research of previous cases to find precedents. It's writing up contracts, which routinely are entirely formulaic. It's paperwork and and due diligence and sending out subpoenas and cease and desist orders and the like.
The majority of that doesn't require standing in court room talking to people. It's paperwork that could largely be automated.
A lot of "knowledge work" has significant elements of this type of work. Most of what loan officers do could be automated with software. There are over a million tax preparers in the US. Most of their jobs could be automated. Teachers? Sorry, in this day and age with the internet and
online courses, a great many of those jobs could be automated. Sure, maybe not all of them. But it doesn't need to be all of them. Oxford University
did a study that concluded that 47% of
all jobs were at risk of being automated.
There would likely be a problem long before that 47% is reached.
I find it hard to understand what would happen if so many people got laid off and needed new jobs (again) but couldn't because everything was already automated.
Here are the standard predictions/theories I hear:
1. It will all work out because it has in the past. New technology creates new jobs. Look at the industrial revolution. People who lost their farm jobs moved to factories. They couldn't predict that those factory jobs would be created, but they were. So new jobs that we also can't predict will probably also be created. No, I don't know what, because I can't predict it. Usually proponents of this theory talk about education a lot.
2.
Universal Basic Income. You're right. We can automate production. And you're also right: who buys the products if nobody has any money to buy them? Solution: just hand out money to everyone to keep the system running.
3. The lower classes will revolt and overthrow the evil rich people. Because rich people are evil and deserve to die. Then what happens, who knows. But we killed the rich people and that's good enough.
4. The evil rich people won't need the peasants anymore, and will use killer robots to eliminate them. Never mind the fact that they probably don't care and it doesn't actually solve the problem. Usually something about overpopulation is mentioned at this point.
5. Class polarization. The peasants don't have the power to revolt, and the elites don't care enough to kill them. So the elites live lives of luxury and the peasants band together in tent cities and eventually form their own society.
6. Star Trek. It would only take the invention of a molecular disassembler/reassembler to render the whole money/economy/employment question mostly irrelevant. Imagine going into your back yard, scooping up a bucket full of dirt, rock and grass trimming. Now imagine dumping it into your machine, then downloading schematics for whatever you want. Say, a chocolate cake. You then push a button. Dirt and grass becomes chocolate cake. If you can use one of those machines to
duplicate themselves, then the first few are built and sold commercially. Then people start duplicating them and handing them out to their neighbors. Money becomes pointless.
7. Similar to 6 could be implemented with proper use of robot manufacturing that we already have rather than requiring atomic assemblers. For example, if robots mine the materials used by robots to create the goods that drones then deliver, you use, and then robots pick up the trash and recycle it...there isn't much need for a money economy in that scenario. These theories usually discuss "energy credits" and the rationing of resources, but realistically once you have the robots doing everything, there isn't really any shortage of power or materials.
8. Stronger socialism, to varying degrees. For example, rather than handing out cash and letting people figure things out, you could possibly have the government own the robots and use them to build houses and food, and then ration them out to people. Or you could assign people pointless jobs, like one guy gets hired to push the button to build the thing, and another guy gets hired to push the button to destroy that thing, and then they're both employed so you give them money to buy the thing built by the third guy. Everyone's employed, everyone has money, everyone eats.
9. Destroy the machines, return to a semi-primitive state.
10. Craftsman economy. People will no longer work "jobs" but instead will make hand crafted knick-knacks and sell them to each other and somehow that will solve everything.
11. It won't happen. Look at ATMs. Since they've been introduced there are actually
more people employed as bank tellers. Automation doesn't destroy jobs. It creates jobs.
12. Reduce work hours and adjust wages upward to solve the problem. If there are 10 people and 400 hours of work to be done, each of them can have 40 hours of work. So long as those 40 hours of work pay enough to keep them alive and happy, that's ok. If automation replaces 200 of those hours, then simply have the people work 20 hours each, but pay them the same amount.
13. Corporations can take over welfare roles previously assigned to government. The market may naturally evolve in this direction. For example, right now you probably have email, web search and driving direction services provided for you free of charge by corporations. If you want to post something to craigslist, you no longer pay for it like you might once have in a newspaper. If you want to buy a house, you can do that research for free. Many things are provided free of charge by corporations, and they make their money elsewhere. If it became cheap enough to provide things like houses and food, it's conceivable that they could be provided at no cost to the consumer. For example, there's discussion that google might choose to make their upcoming robot taxis and project loon internet access available free of charge.