Another day, another bloodcurdling report about how robots are going to steal all our jobs and smash all that is holy about the dignity of work. This time it's from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and they tell us that by the 2040s some 30 percent of jobs will be automated, perhaps 44 percent for those requiring a low level of education. Actually, the report isn't quite as "woe is unto us" as it sounds, although it does contain a couple of crucial errors.

What the authors get right is that there will be economic growth over this time, which will help create new jobs to replace the ones lost to automation. It's a logical conclusion; after all, we've been doing this automation of heft and grunt for 250 years now and there's no particular reason to think that the underlying processes have changed.

"Destroying" Jobs Frees Up Labor

The fact artificial intelligence and other technical advances will replace human skill should not be a cause for dismay—after all, the same has been true of every stage of technological change from the loom to the washing machine.

That automation destroys or displaces jobs is not an error or problem; it's the whole point.

However, the PWC report has misidentified the mechanism here. It's not that economic growth absorbs labor, per se. It is the way automation frees up previous working hours for more productive uses which grow the economy and make us richer.

Imagine it takes 100 units of labor to make 100 widgets until a new machine now means we need 50 units to make 100 widgets. We can, with that labor, now have 200 widgets—we're richer—or we can have 100 widgets and 50 units of labor's worth of clothes, fancy food, or tickets to the ballet. We're richer, the economy is larger, by whatever value we place upon the extra things we can buy.

This is more than mere nitpicking. It is only by grasping this that we can understand our task here. That automation destroys or displaces jobs is not an error or problem; it's the whole point. We want to kill jobs with automation, always and everywhere, as it is what that newly freed labor does next which makes us richer.