The main idea is an "automation tax" where the State captures more of the proceeds from profits gained through automation, and uses that to subsidize the labor pool that isn't benefiting directly from automation:
"Ford doesn’t leave his readers with just another doomsday scenario, he does his best to find a solution. No, he doesn’t think we should (or perhaps even can) avoid automation. Instead, TLITT explores some pretty radical ways that we could put purchasing power back in the hands of the masses and create non-traditional jobs with economic incentives. He speaks of ‘recapturing wages’ by imposing capital/labor taxes on industries as they automate, and value added taxes to goods as they become cheaper. These taxes should not be large enough to discourage automation, but they could (Ford proposes) provide revenue for a new kind of job."
"Ford’s ‘virtual jobs’ are incentivised programs that would reward people for pursuits such as education, civic service, journalism, and environmental responsibility. These jobs would be paid for by the state through the revenue gained through recaptured wages. Those who accomplished more in their virtual jobs would receive higher wages, thus providing the financial incentive that everyone needs to feel like they are really working. There would be some industries and some workers that exist outside of this new system, and plenty of space and encouragement (Ford says) for entrepreneurs, who would still have the most potential for monetary gain."
2. If you're of the sort that is looking to leverage automation in your own enterprise, Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over" looks at the emerging economy and discusses strategies for making the most of it:
Cowen posits a world of two types of workers - the leaders who continue learning to keep up with changes in their industries and marketplaces, and the followers who fit in where they can (or not at all). Automation and augmented intelligence is a big part of Cowen's story, and he draws heavily upon chess "cyborgs" as a metaphor:
"Some of you will know that Average is Over contains an extensive discussion of “freestyle chess,” where humans can use any and all tools available — most of all computers and computer programs — to play the best chess game possible. The book also notes that “man plus computer” is a stronger player than “computer alone,” at least provided the human knows what he is doing."
"And that's exactly what happened to two amateurs in 2005. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen were chess buddies who met at a local club in New Hampshire in the US. They had spent a few years honing their skills at the game and Stephen, in particular, was keen on chess programming."
"They entered a 'freestyle' tournament that year which attracted several teams of grandmasters aided by computers. The tournament was played remotely, online, via the servers of Playchess.com."
"Both Cramton and Stephen were amateurs, they had day jobs and were effectively unknown in the world of competitive chess. But they had some clever tricks up their sleeve. For one, they had developed a database of personal strategies that showed which of the two players typically had greater success when faced with similar situations."
"'We did have a really extensive database that I worked on for four or five years before that,' remembers Stephen. 'Steve had contributed to it.'"
"They also had three PCs chugging through the numbers and these had been specially prepared by Stephen. But crucially, they knew how to actually play a cyborg game."
"'We had really good methodology for when to use the computer and when to use our human judgement, that elevated our advantage,' Stephen says."
The fundamental lesson that I take away from this is that trying to out-compete automation directly on its own terms is likely a fool's errand by oneself, but bringing yourself up to speed and learning to *leverage* automation as part of one's *own* processes may be a winning formula, if modern chess is any indicator. However, this requires the worker to take their own fate into their own hands, and start learning how to exploit automation on their own, instead of waiting for someone to show them how (which gets back to Tyler's original world of two types of workers).
This is a technique that I've used to great effect in my own software business (declarative systems - writing code that is able to write code, instead of programming everything directly).
3. Note that none of these ideas are new ones. The godfather of this philosophy is the same fellow that gave us the mouse, demo'ed a Skype-like system back in the '60s, and contributed to our own modern computing ecosystem much more than he is credited, Douglas Engelbart:
While Engelbart is best known for his "Mother of All Demos" and things like the mouse, he was also chewing on this problem and proposed the "Bootstrapping" strategy:
The idea was that for humans to get past their implicit limitations, they would need to adopt a strategy of co-evolution with their personal technology infrastructures - improving the technology to produce incremental gains in productivity, and then use those gains to improve processes and their technology more, rinse and repeat. Essentially a form of compound interest for personal labor productivity. In 1962, he prepared a report for the Air Force describing this process:
To execute this strategy successfully, you not only need people willing and able to tinker with their tools and environment to achieve the incremental productivity gains, but you also need tools and an environment that is tinker-able. Engelbart designed tools like the mouse for this purpose, and his vision for good technology stands in stark contrast to the (Steve) Jobsian vision of technology users as mere consumers who are constrained by the more enlightened vision of the technology's designers.
While it's a bit heavy on the social science (especially Science and Technology Studies), Thierry Bardini's "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution and the Origins of Personal Computing" is an EXCELLENT volume exploring these themes:
I don't know if this gives you any answers about what to do about the coming automation economic apocalypse (my strategy is to keep augmenting and iterating my own tools and processes), but I hope that the suggestions above give you some resources to help think about it at a deeper level than "Them damn robots took our jobs!" :-)
A couple of reading suggestions:
1. Martin Ford covers the automation issue in great depth in his book "The Lights in the Tunnel":
https://singularityhub.com/2009/12/15/martin-ford-asks-will-automation-lead-to-economic-collapse/
The main idea is an "automation tax" where the State captures more of the proceeds from profits gained through automation, and uses that to subsidize the labor pool that isn't benefiting directly from automation:
"Ford doesn’t leave his readers with just another doomsday scenario, he does his best to find a solution. No, he doesn’t think we should (or perhaps even can) avoid automation. Instead, TLITT explores some pretty radical ways that we could put purchasing power back in the hands of the masses and create non-traditional jobs with economic incentives. He speaks of ‘recapturing wages’ by imposing capital/labor taxes on industries as they automate, and value added taxes to goods as they become cheaper. These taxes should not be large enough to discourage automation, but they could (Ford proposes) provide revenue for a new kind of job."
"Ford’s ‘virtual jobs’ are incentivised programs that would reward people for pursuits such as education, civic service, journalism, and environmental responsibility. These jobs would be paid for by the state through the revenue gained through recaptured wages. Those who accomplished more in their virtual jobs would receive higher wages, thus providing the financial incentive that everyone needs to feel like they are really working. There would be some industries and some workers that exist outside of this new system, and plenty of space and encouragement (Ford says) for entrepreneurs, who would still have the most potential for monetary gain."
2. If you're of the sort that is looking to leverage automation in your own enterprise, Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over" looks at the emerging economy and discusses strategies for making the most of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Is_Over
Cowen posits a world of two types of workers - the leaders who continue learning to keep up with changes in their industries and marketplaces, and the followers who fit in where they can (or not at all). Automation and augmented intelligence is a big part of Cowen's story, and he draws heavily upon chess "cyborgs" as a metaphor:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-humans-still-good-for-the-turning-point-in-freestyle-chess-may-be-approaching.html
"Some of you will know that Average is Over contains an extensive discussion of “freestyle chess,” where humans can use any and all tools available — most of all computers and computer programs — to play the best chess game possible. The book also notes that “man plus computer” is a stronger player than “computer alone,” at least provided the human knows what he is doing."
More on this phenomenon:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151201-the-cyborg-chess-players-that-cant-be-beaten
"And that's exactly what happened to two amateurs in 2005. Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen were chess buddies who met at a local club in New Hampshire in the US. They had spent a few years honing their skills at the game and Stephen, in particular, was keen on chess programming."
"They entered a 'freestyle' tournament that year which attracted several teams of grandmasters aided by computers. The tournament was played remotely, online, via the servers of Playchess.com."
"Both Cramton and Stephen were amateurs, they had day jobs and were effectively unknown in the world of competitive chess. But they had some clever tricks up their sleeve. For one, they had developed a database of personal strategies that showed which of the two players typically had greater success when faced with similar situations."
"'We did have a really extensive database that I worked on for four or five years before that,' remembers Stephen. 'Steve had contributed to it.'"
"They also had three PCs chugging through the numbers and these had been specially prepared by Stephen. But crucially, they knew how to actually play a cyborg game."
"'We had really good methodology for when to use the computer and when to use our human judgement, that elevated our advantage,' Stephen says."
The fundamental lesson that I take away from this is that trying to out-compete automation directly on its own terms is likely a fool's errand by oneself, but bringing yourself up to speed and learning to *leverage* automation as part of one's *own* processes may be a winning formula, if modern chess is any indicator. However, this requires the worker to take their own fate into their own hands, and start learning how to exploit automation on their own, instead of waiting for someone to show them how (which gets back to Tyler's original world of two types of workers).
This is a technique that I've used to great effect in my own software business (declarative systems - writing code that is able to write code, instead of programming everything directly).
3. Note that none of these ideas are new ones. The godfather of this philosophy is the same fellow that gave us the mouse, demo'ed a Skype-like system back in the '60s, and contributed to our own modern computing ecosystem much more than he is credited, Douglas Engelbart:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/
While Engelbart is best known for his "Mother of All Demos" and things like the mouse, he was also chewing on this problem and proposed the "Bootstrapping" strategy:
https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/187/
The idea was that for humans to get past their implicit limitations, they would need to adopt a strategy of co-evolution with their personal technology infrastructures - improving the technology to produce incremental gains in productivity, and then use those gains to improve processes and their technology more, rinse and repeat. Essentially a form of compound interest for personal labor productivity. In 1962, he prepared a report for the Air Force describing this process:
https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138
To execute this strategy successfully, you not only need people willing and able to tinker with their tools and environment to achieve the incremental productivity gains, but you also need tools and an environment that is tinker-able. Engelbart designed tools like the mouse for this purpose, and his vision for good technology stands in stark contrast to the (Steve) Jobsian vision of technology users as mere consumers who are constrained by the more enlightened vision of the technology's designers.
While it's a bit heavy on the social science (especially Science and Technology Studies), Thierry Bardini's "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution and the Origins of Personal Computing" is an EXCELLENT volume exploring these themes:
http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=540
I don't know if this gives you any answers about what to do about the coming automation economic apocalypse (my strategy is to keep augmenting and iterating my own tools and processes), but I hope that the suggestions above give you some resources to help think about it at a deeper level than "Them damn robots took our jobs!" :-)