As automation keeps on improving and productivity gets more centralized will there be a shortage of jobs?
The above poster makes a fair point that this is work well suited to automation. In the broader sense with retail closing and Amazon taking market share, centralizing productivity (i.e. reducing retail jobs to fewer picker jobs), and then automating those fewer jobs away entirely, are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?
I genuinely have no idea how society would work if you simply eliminated 20% of jobs tomorrow. Mass poverty? Artificially created jobs? A larger rich/poor divide?
It's highly unlikely that 20% will disappear overnight. Every other case where we've seen automation/innovation eliminating jobs has been a gradual process, so I see no reason for this not to continue.
Amazon has been testing cashierless grocery stores, yet they haven't completely eliminated their competition where they're available. I'm sure they'll become popular, but they'll likely roll out relatively slowly. We already have self checkout, yet some people prefer to checkout with a human, and I doubt that will change.
Manufacturing jobs have been using more and more automation, yet manufacturing jobs are still available, just different. Many jobs that used to be minimum wage jobs have been replaced by higher paying jobs with specialists; there are fewer of them, sure, but they pay better.
As labor jobs get replaced by automation, we'll invent new jobs to take advantage of the increased labor pool. That's just the way innovation goes.
No, because job demand is not a zero-sum game but a function of supply.
For every job that gets "destroyed" by technology, several new ones are created. The problem is we, as humans, are terrible at predicting the future - for example, try explaining a mobile app developer job to someone thirty years ago in 1989. Now try imagine what jobs we will have 30 years from now, keeping in mind how off a person in 1989 would have been.
Perfect world solution here is that Amazon retrains their workers, but as we're not in a perfect world, that typically falls to the state. As human labor becomes more valuable to fill niche and volatile job markets, due to automation taking large scalable jobs, retraining is going to become even more important.
I don't think a mobile app developer would be too difficult to explain to someone from the 80s: they already understood the concept of computer programmers and software, and "everyone has a pocket computer" existed for decades in science fiction by that time.
A better analogy would be explaining something like social media consultants (or for that matter, social media influencers). Hell, _I_ still don't understand the user behavior underpinning the social media economy, and I've lived in it for a decade.
True, but even a keyboardless PC in your pocket would have been hard to comprehend, as you would have to explain everything from touch LCD screens to the internet. Also talk about online-only businesses or even drop shipping. In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online. There are catalog analogies, but the concepts are so foreign it makes it difficult to visualize 30 years from now without projecting our own biases onto it.
even a keyboardless PC in your pocket would have been hard to comprehend
Given there were two pocket sized PCs released in 1989 - the Poqet PC and Atari Portfolio, that seems unlikely, except in a "the future is here but not evenly distributed" sense. "How would you use one without a keyboard?" "You'd touch the screen directly" "oh, ok".
But even then, LCD pocket calculators were common by 1989. Wearable computing had been around since 1981 (Steve Mann) for anyone following tech developments. Seiko had released a wearable computer watch in 1984.
In 1989 you didn't even have the internet, much less anyone purchasing things online
But you had telephone ordering. And you could have had fax ordering. Back to the Future 2 came out in 1989 and they were predicting a future world of 2015, which included a kind of tablet computer, head mounted displays, flat-screens, implicit voice recognition[3]. OK it's not PCs, smartphones or the internet but it's enough that a blockbuster Hollywood movie expected people to understand "pay by putting your thumb on this portable device", and not find it "hard to comprehend".
(Terminator was from 1984 and that was a mobile, keyboardless computer, in a sense).
Yea I dunno, all of these seem like pretty simple extensions of existing concepts, to the point that they existed in pretty-much fully-realized form in sci-fi (incl Internet and touchscreen analogues).
I should note that I wasn't trying to be pedantic, and the specific example used in the parent comment doesn't detract from its point. I just think that the social media economy is utterly novel and fascinating.
> are we going to have a hole in society where those jobs once existed?
This wouldn't be the first time. Happened with farming 100-150 years ago. It's going to be a painful adjustment, but until all human needs are met, I'm sure humans that still have jobs can come up with work they want performed in exchange for money so long as politicians don't legislate against the existence of those jobs.
Perhaps the state should be responsible for the roughness of economic transition, especially for work-affecting phenomena which is global? Such as through polishing the unemployment program.
Civil rights, Apollo, total cultural leadership, leading decolonisation the world over, Bretton Woods still on, net exporter still, pre local peak-oil...
That would be okay so long as any solution is temporary with clear criteria for sunsetting the government's involvement. Last thing we need is yet another agency that succumbs to the Shirky Principle and citizens become dependent on the government instead of taking up one of the new jobs that appear in the next few decades.
