Technology really did eliminate jobs and they never came back - the jobs of horses. There nothing a horse can do, outside of hobbyist niches that a motorized ma

Technology really did eliminate jobs and they never came back - the jobs of horses. There nothing a horse can do, outside of hobbyist niches that a motorized machine can't do. When motorized machines took over jobs traditionally done by horses, they were not freed to pursue niches where they had a comparative advantage. They were simply replaced. Right now, there are still a lot of things that the dumbest human worker can do that give robots a hard time, mostly having to do with visual recognition - being able to find a berry on a bush to pluck, or find the corners of a crumpled shirt to fold. There's been enough of that kind of work to employ an essentially unlimited number of unskilled workers, no matter how much work that requires little or no pattern recognition has been automated. But if somebody can figure out how to get a computer to "see," it's all over for unskilled workers. I'm no expert in AI, but I would consider it fairly likely that we'll live to see that happen, and I don't see any reason to be so pessimistic as to expect it to take 1000 (what kind of prediction can you make that far out anyway?). We see news all the time on sites like this about incremental progress on that front.