The phrase “easy to imagine†has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine†that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now-largely-discredited thesis of income volatility and our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap†in American politics.
I, for one, welcome our new robot employees. Er, and employers. But that’s not actually Will’s point.