ROBOTS: The Beginning Of The End Of Work.

From the cute little vacuum Roomba to Siri or Alexa and cars that drive themselves, we are at the beginning of the end of work. In 2013, a now-famous Oxford University analysis forecasted that 47 percent of all jobs are threatened in the United States. There are already signs from shuttered shopping malls to the fact that robots and artificial intelligence are taking over factories, offices, and cash registers. Clearly, they will win the job stakes because they don’t ask for raises or take sick days.

All of which is to say that winter is coming to America’s middle class.

The late physicist Stephen Hawking warned that this would result in income disparity and chaos. “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality,” he wrote.

Hawking’s warning may be regarded by some as hysterical, but it should be heeded. Deniers maintain that automation triggers “creative disruption” or a transition from lousy jobs to better ones. For instance, Silicon Valley types trot out the fact that in 1900, 40 percent of people slogged daily on farms, and now only 2 percent do. However, their example disproves their point: The transition in the United States from farm to city took generations and was grueling, scarred by social disruption, mass underemployment, unrest, sweatshops, urban slums, forced urbanization, poverty, crime, worker struggles, and enormous socioeconomic upheaval and strife. This time will be different, and possibly worse, unless brakes or policies are put in place as automation increases.

The automation trend clearly makes workers uneasy, but hard facts are unavailable because technological unemployment is not identified and highlighted in economic reports as it should be. This lapse lulls some into disbelief about dire predictions because, after all, unemployment levels are relatively low, (though so is labor force participation), and job creation growth appears respectable. But a glimpse into what’s underway was contained in a 2014 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics which measured hours of work (whether by self-employed, part-time or full-time workers) and not jobs over a 15-year period from 1998 to 2013.

During that time, economic output in the United States increased by 42 percent (or $3.5 trillion after inflation adjustments). But the number of hours worked remained exactly the same, at 194 billion hours in total. This is technological unemployment: Zero growth in the number of hours needed to create wealth despite a population increase of 40 million people. . . .

Robots and AI are going to cut an even deeper swath through the middle class, blue and white collar, and there are no replacement jobs.

And unemployment, Nancy Pelosi’s reassurances notwithstanding, isn’t good for people.