Heron

In our economy, many of the jobs most resistant to automation are those with the least economic value. Just consider the diversity of tasks, unpredictable terrains, and specialized tools that a landscaper confronts in a single day. No robot is intelligent enough to perform this $8-an-hour work.

Telepresence means that in theory, 10, 100, or 1,000 times as many workers could compete (virtually) for the same work. No matter how bad things get in Madrid or Houston, an avatar worker somewhere else could sell his or her labor for less. The same outsourcing logic applies to many high-wage jobs that rely on physical presence and motor skills, including the work done by cardiologists and machinists.

Previous waves of outsourcing should remind us: the legal, political, and social obstacles to an avatar economy may prove greater than the technical ones. How will the meaning of work change when a gardener bot is controlled by a different remote worker every day? Or when one driver supervises 50 mostly autonomous taxis? What—and how much—work will be left in areas with the highest labor and housing costs?