We’ve always been on the brink of societal collapse. I mean, my bet is that you’re going to see a lot of carrots and sticks after automation really starts putting tens of millions of people out of work in under fifteen or twenty years, where you’ll see rewards for people to not have kids or something. It won’t quite be China style population control, but it’s definitely going to be necessary until such time as first-world governments figure out what to do with people who just refuse to learn skills that aren’t easily automated. Universal basic income would be necessary, but it’s so expensive that it would require a total rewrite of tax and benefit structures, and the only way to pay for that is something like a national sales tax, because there aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires to pay for it. You could tax them into oblivion and that would get you maybe a year or two. It’s going to be borne on the backs of the people, like it or not.

What has historically kept society from collapsing is adaptation. Right now, there’s a big flashing neon sign that says human wages are going to outpace the all-in cost of automating no-skill and semi-skilled labor, and nobody’s doing anything about it. The laborers see it and think they’ll just destroy the machines, but that didn’t work when the Luddites tried it, and we have cameras and alarms, now, and better yet, we have insurance, so the company could just close up shop and use the payout to open an even more automated factory in a more favorable location, since they’re no longer beholden to needing a large pool of employees. After all, who’s going to object to a factory that doesn’t displace workers because it never had any? But, assuming we don’t want the displaced workers to starve to death, it’s really important for elected officials to start discussing this stuff now, rather than when it’s already happening, and the first question should be, “What are the long-term effects of increasing wages?” because the most important answer is not inflation.

And, as for climate refugees, nobody’s going to want to move to a country that doesn’t have any jobs for the people that already live there. Think about all of the immigrants who became cab drivers because the skill barrier for that is relatively low, and then think about what they’d do if those cabs drove themselves. Agriculture jobs will go out, and that will take a while, because programming a robotic hand to not crush a tomato is really difficult, but it’ll happen. Farms will require fewer and fewer workers, just as they have for the last hundred or so years.

It’s going to be interesting, but I don’t think it’ll go to full collapse, at least not in the first-world countries. Maybe a couple, toward the beginning, but that’ll be countries like Turkey or Argentina, where they’ve never really had a firm grasp on economics, so their whole economy just falls apart every twenty or forty years. And then maybe it’ll happen to someplace like Spain or Italy or something, and then everybody else will see what happens and start moving to prevent that in their own countries.