That only works if the number of new jobs replaces the number of eliminated jobs though.
I’m not against automation per se. It’d be a long, sad ride for me if I was. I do think that a number of people handwave away the human cost during the transition with bits about Civil War era farmers or buggy whips or the number of ATMs vs bank tellers*. People who are concerned about their jobs have a legitimate worry and I think that, as a society, we should be more worried about it or have a better plan than flippant stories or Other People’s Money clips on YouTube.
*Said “study” glosses over the fact that bank teller jobs rapidly leveled once ATMs came out and decreased as a per capita percentage even if they slightly increased in total numbers. Also, they’re dropping now as a result of online and mobile banking.
That’s why I said, “In theory…” I know that these factor cannot balance out exactly, as that’s just pretty damn unlikely, and that there is probably more of a tendency for there to be fewer jobs as a trend over time to produce the goods and services that are consumed by the population.
I agree about the handwaving. On the one hand, it is an improvement to the economy, if you go int your local fast food restaurant, and the only labor that is there is a manager overseeing operations, and a maintenance technician or two. Labor is expensive, and anything you can do to reduce it reduces costs and improves the economy. Unfortunately, that also means that the people who do labor get paid less per product created (overall), which makes it harder for them to afford those products. I think one of the mistakes of the past was society not recognizing what happens when workers are displaced by automation. I agree it is easy to say “screw the buggy whip makers”, but at the same time, now you’ve got a whole bunch of people without a marketable skill. As long as it is recognized that there are going to be people displaced by automation, and things are set up for taking care of them with either a basic income or retraining or both, then the automation is probably going to be overall a good thing. If it just puts people out of work, and no effort is put into making sure that those out of work are still able to lead productive dignified lives, then, while the economy may be more efficient, the purpose of the economy, that of ensuring that goods and services are distributed to the people and places that need them, will have failed.
This is the point where someone trots out the idea of a guaranteed minimum income. Basically the government tops up peoples’ incomes if they make less than a certain amount. Among other things, this would theoretically replace much of the welfare and social assistance systems.
It might be like the Alaska Permanent Fund, or whatever they call it, where every resident of Alaska gets a cheque from their share of the oil royalties. For a guaranteed minimum a income, you might scale that up to a share of the wealth generated annually by society as a whole.
I think that we will have to start looking at something like that, if only to stave off social unrest by the structurally-unemployed.
The point I think you’re missing is that the 200,000 people who would be doing those jobs today are not all out of work, they are working at other jobs - a significant number of which didn’t exist in 1980.
I just can’t get on the bandwagon that robots are going to end human employment in the next few lifetimes, at least. Automation has never worked that way and there is no reason to believe it will in the foreseeable future.
It should be something to keep an eye on. Automation is picking up, the pace of all technological progress is picking up. It would be very easy to find quite a number of people out of a job very quickly. Look what’s happening in retail, that’s not automation, so much as amazon (which relies quite a bit on automation) and the internet as a whole. Lots of jobs going away there.
We can probably find something productive to be done that is not being done right now by people, as they are too busy doing something else, but it is that transition that needs to be managed. It doesn’t do much good if everyone over 25 is out of work because there is no investment in job re-training to move people from obsolete jobs to growth industries. We’re talking about taking a low skilled worker, someone who maybe made cheeseburgers at mcdonalds (nothing wrong with that, and doesn’t mean you are stupid or incapable of learning, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time in fast food) who is going to be needing to now build, maintain, or otherwise use these new devices for a higher productivity multiplier. This will require training, mabe extensive training. And during this training, they need to have money to continue to support themselves and their family.
I do think that overall, we will be alright, and that there will be work for most people who want work, but the transitions will be rough, and if they are not managed, if we just fire all the buggy whip makers, then there is going to be quite a bit of pain in that transition.