Futurology

The person making this claim, Peter Chen, is the founder of a successful robotics firm, Covariant, that already sells robots. Here are some of their robots in action packing meal kits. I think this gives his claims some weight and credibility.

Understandably enough, people often focus on the human job loss implications of this. But there are also other economic challenges. A world where robots and AI do more and more of the work formerly done by people will be a world of constant deflation. By eliminating human wages from production, everything they produce will get cheaper.

Many people don't appreciate it, but deflation is extremely destructive to how our economies are run. Over time it grows the size of debts relative to incomes and creates recessionary conditions that then often spiral into further problems. My guess is that we are going to start hearing a lot more about this in a few years.