The first thing to understand in these discussions is that this has been happening continuously for 250 years. The Industrial revolution never stopped.
For all these 25 decades, people have worried a lot about what will happen to everyone losing their jobs to new technology. It's always turned out that new jobs kept appearing as the old ones disappeared, and the result of the increased productivity the "lost jobs" represent has manifested in proportionally increased wages. It's hard to compare directly, but we're about 30x richer per person then 250 years ago. And also a lot more people.
Right now we're supposed to be in the middle of a Job Automation Holocaust. THIS TIME IT'S (as usual) DIFFERENT! And yet if you lift your gaze from the theories and look at real world indicators, unemployment is extremely low.
Now, it's of course true that this time it actually can be different, and I don't mind people making arguments to that effect. I have less respect for those who argue like this is a brand new disaster falling from the sky, not the prevailing trend since centuries.
One thing that is different this time is that we are more directly replacing humans.
When we replaced, say, horse drawn wagons with trucks, yes, we killed off a lot of jobs associated with wagons. Wagon drivers, wagon builders, horse trainers, horse feed suppliers, etc., might have lost some or all of their work.
But trucks needed drivers, truck makers, mechanics, fuel supply, and so on, so a lot of new work was created.
Now suppose we replace human driven trucks with self-driving trucks, getting rid of a lot of truck driver jobs, and also a lot of jobs related to supporting truck drivers.
Yes, the self-driving trucks will create some new work. But a self-driving truck is pretty much just a regular truck with some extra sensors, a computer, some actuators to let the computer operate the controls, and some software. The sensors, computers, and actuators are all commodity items or close to it.
So rather than create new jobs sufficient to counter the lost jobs of truck drivers and those who support truck drives, switching to self-driving trucks just increases demand a bit for some commodity hardware, and requires some extra training for truck mechanics to maintain the new equipment.
We're starting to transition from a type of industrial revolution where people using machines are replaced by people using very different machines, to a type where people using machines are being replaced by very similar machines that require fewer or no humans to operate.
Prior to the industrial revolution something like 80% of the US population was in agriculture and now it's 1.5% and we are still at near full unemployment. I think the idea that humans will somehow run out of useful stuff to do once we have robots doing the current set of things is a very fixed-mindset way of thinking. If there is money kicking around, people will find productive stuff to do and build companies to do things that weren't possible before.
Sure, there will be new work created, but what makes you so sure that new work will go to humans? Why wouldn't the guy doing things that were not possible before just buy robots do those new jobs?
Well, we kind-of define work as being that done by humans.
My laptop does more number-crunching than all the human computers of last century every morning, but we don't count this as work taken away from anyone.
Humans find new things to do, providing services (or amusements) to each other which were not previously thought necessary. The entire services sector of the economy is things that basically weren't done 100 years ago (or were done on such a tiny scale as not to matter). And we all work hard to afford these new things, by making other such new things (like websites!), partly as a game of keeping up with the neighbors, rather than being content with our great-grandparents' living standards.
Yeah, another way to say the same thing is that an unemployed human is an underexploited resource. Capitalism is really good at not letting those go to waste.
For all these 25 decades, people have worried a lot about what will happen to everyone losing their jobs to new technology. It's always turned out that new jobs kept appearing as the old ones disappeared, and the result of the increased productivity the "lost jobs" represent has manifested in proportionally increased wages. It's hard to compare directly, but we're about 30x richer per person then 250 years ago. And also a lot more people.
Right now we're supposed to be in the middle of a Job Automation Holocaust. THIS TIME IT'S (as usual) DIFFERENT! And yet if you lift your gaze from the theories and look at real world indicators, unemployment is extremely low.
Now, it's of course true that this time it actually can be different, and I don't mind people making arguments to that effect. I have less respect for those who argue like this is a brand new disaster falling from the sky, not the prevailing trend since centuries.