Listening to Marshall Brain explain the future as he sees it, it's relatively easy to suspend disbelief and agree how plausible it is that over the next 40 years most of our jobs will be displaced by robots.
After all, it only takes a typical round of errands to reveal how far we've come already. From automated gas pumps to bank ATMs to self-service checkout lanes at major retailers, service jobs already are being replaced by machines on a scale of obvious magnitude.
Fast-forward today's innovations another few decades, and it doesn't require a great leap of faith to envision how advances in image processing, microprocessor speed and human-motion simulation could lead to the automation of most current low-paying jobs.
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Factor in the historical speed of technological advancement in the modern era, epitomized by Moore's Law of semiconductor power expansion, and it starts to sound like a no-brainer.
At least that's how Brain (yes, that is his real name) sees things unrolling.
"We aren't realizing it, but it's only going to accelerate and magnify as we go forward," he said, segueing into a lengthier discussion on why job loss due to robotic displacement will be one of the key economic issues facing future generations.
According to Brain's projections, laid out in an essay, "Robotic Nation," humanoid robots will be widely available by the year 2030, and able to replace jobs currently filled by people in areas such as fast-food service, housecleaning and retail. Unless ways are found to compensate for these lost jobs, Brain estimates that more than half of Americans could be unemployed by 2055.
Dire, indeed. But Brain, a Raleigh, North Carolina, father of four and founder of HowStuffWorks, is probably not the kind of guy one would expect to see sounding the alarm bells over a futuristic robotic revolution.
As a website publisher and author of about a dozen books of the how-it-works genre, Brain's traditional strength has been in explaining the internal workings of things that already exist. After spending years writing nonfiction, however, Brain sees the switch to futurism and sci-fi as a natural progression.
"I guess it's a confluence of reading, of finding out how a lot of different things work and having that all loaded in my head," he said.
Cobbling together bits about how things work provided Brain enough inspiration to attempt his first novel, which will be released free in serial form online starting Aug. 15. The story begins on a prophetic note:
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2015." The extended plot revolves around a society in which robots are able to fill most of the jobs that exist in the economy.
To complement the novel, Brain also is publishing a series of futuristic essays extrapolating on ideas presented in the story. On a more capitalistic note, he's also filed for a patent to cover an automated system for managing humans and machines in the retail and fast-food businesses.
In the essay series, the first installment begins with a discussion of a routine trip with his kids to the local McDonald's. While there, Brain tests out a new electronic food-ordering kiosk and he ponders how in the future, most fast-food work will be done by machines.
Food-ordering kiosks are just the beginning. Already, McDonald's is testing an automated burger-cooking process that threatens to make patty flippers obsolete. By 2015, Brain estimates, about 5 million jobs in the retail sector will be lost to automation.
But many techies who discussed Brain's essay on the geek site Slashdot found Brain's projections less than convincing.
One contradiction in the logic noted by a poster was that in order for humanoid robots to become widely deployed, people have to purchase them. But if everyone is unemployed, there will be no one to buy the robots.
Another poster said that although it's common for futuristic fear-mongering to accompany the introduction of new technologies, people do manage to find new jobs to replace those that have been automated.
Brain himself, though, isn't convinced this will happen.
For those who take solace in the fact that robots may at least open up opportunities in the field of robot repair, for example, he offers a more troubling alternative vision:
"When a robot needs repair, another robot will bundle it onto a pallet. A robotic forklift will place the pallet on a truck. The truck will drive to a repair facility. The facility will repair the robot with highly automated systems that require no human intervention or supervision. Human beings will not be repairing robots — robots will."