"The horses lost to the cars and didn't find new jobs" That's a good line. I hope you don't mind if I pinch it. I agree that there is not obvious rule in econ

"The horses lost to the cars and didn't find new jobs" That's a good line. I hope you don't mind if I pinch it. I agree that there is not obvious rule in economics stating that most humans must remain employed. I also agree that without close to full employment (say long term >80% of people that want/need jobs) the basic economic and political paradigms we have no longer work. I'm kind of agnostic whether or not we are headed there. Technology taking skill out of the equation like in Adam Smith's famous pin example is somewhat similar to driverless cars. Generally technology has affected the demand for labour all throughout history, and it's affected the demand for labour of all kinds. We used to need musicians to listen to music, bars & cinemas employed them. Is that brain power or manual labour? We used to need engineers to do calculations by hand. Demand for engineers stayed high because we just do more engineering. Also, in my agnosticism, I think there's a bunch of room for middle ground outcomes. Unemployment that stays around 30%, for example. That is also a political paradigm shift. I don't expect we'll soon run out of demand or that people will not have an effect on our productive capacity. But perhaps the bar for economic productivity will be higher. That's potentially a problem.