4 ms·
> It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another. That's exactly right. We've been cre
by jganetsk 10y ago
> It's important to remember that past revolutions in automation have destroyed one field of labor while creating another.
That's exactly right. We've been creating work to keep people busy for 200 years in many more ways than you mention. Consumerism. Marketing. Bureaucracy. We have one industry that makes people sick (food) and another industry that makes people healthy (healthcare). The twin peaks of the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, especially in the USA. We have industries that make plastic casings to wrap goods, just so we can sell goods to consumers, who unwrap and immediately dispose the plastic, so that another industry (sanitation) can take them away.
We basically have a society which continuously breaks glass windows and then fixes them. It's all, in some sense, pure dead weight, just to keep people employed.
So why should this stop now?
- cylinder 10y agoThe New Economy: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms-poured-780m-painkillers-into-wv-amid-rise-of-overdoses http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms... Think of the additional economic boost from treating these people in hospitals, or even better, prisons! Countless "jobs" will be created!
- mdorazio 10y agoBecause we are in the process of automating away all jobs except consumption this time around. In the past as those new "busywork" industries popped up, human workers filled the new roles. But now we're approaching the point where every new busywork job can be filled by machines, which are cheaper than employees. Health and food are actually a great example. We've already automated away most farm jobs (in the US at least) and a lot of the food production & prep jobs for junk food type things. And now we're starting to see in the healthcare space that software can reduce loads on doctors, for example ML-based interpretation of X-rays, automated patient record tracking, etc. Fitbit is the tip of iceberg for what's possible in at-home health monitoring based on software instead of humans. I would argue that while the sickness and health industries can grow indefinitely, the number of jobs in each cannot.