What We Need—and Don’t Need—From Government in the Robot Age
A robotic arm transports sheets of glass during the manufacturing of photovoltaic cells at SolarWorld AG in Freiberg, Germany.
Photographer: Martin Leissl/BloombergCapitalism has brought opportunity to billions of people around the world and reduced poverty and disease on a monumental scale. Driving that progress have been advances in knowledge and technology that disrupt industries and create new ones. We celebrate market disruptions for the overall benefits they generate, but they also present challenges to workers whose skills are rendered obsolete.
Today, as the age of automation affects more industries, those challenges are affecting more and more people. Attempting to slow the pace of technological change to preserve particular jobs is neither possible nor desirable, and there may be no better example than in the energy industry.