From endless ladder to downward ramp

A couple of months ago, in the post “The Myth of the Endless Ladder,” I critiqued the widespread assumption that progressin production technology, such as advances in robotics and analytical software, “frees humans up to work on higher-value tasks,” in the words of economics reporter Annie Lowrey. While such a dynamic has often been true in the past, particularly in the middleyears of the last century, there’s no guarantee that it will be true in the future. Evidence is growing, in fact, that...