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People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm a

People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

anigbrowl 10y ago
It would be facile to ignore the massive and frequently bloody consequences of such previous economic disruptions. People didn't just go through a period of anxiety and then drift into new jobs and feel content again during previous industrial revolutions.
- lend000 10y ago
  You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.) Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    That's not how I read the comment. I read it as admitting that both things can be (and probably are) true: these sorts of disruptions can be awful and bloody for the people living through them and can also be a net benefit to society. It's looking like we may very well be those people who will be living through the next one of these, so it's reasonable for us to be worried about the awfulness of the transition.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    > You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society I don't think he does, though. I'd be much quicker to say that other people frame the disruptions as though they never had significant downsides; I constantly see people saying "most people found new work eventually without too much of a pay cut" as though that implies no one suffered. More theoretically, we ought to be capable of imagining some net-positive change which causes front-end disruptions so devastating that we can't endure through to the positive result. Imagine rendering 50% of people unemployed in one year and ask whether they would all quietly drift into new jobs, or whether they would set all the data centers on fire and cancel out the progress. I don't think things are that bad, but pretending a long-run positive exempts you from planning for short-run harms is pretty unfair.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I agree with you about the net benefit in purely economic terms, but it's easy to overweight the benefit when you were born after the costs were paid. Industrialization of production also inevitably led to the industrialization of warfare and we know how that turned out. I can't say with any certainty that we're definitely better off than if WW2 had never happened. Suppose it had not, and that there had been slower technological development without the necessity of war, so that in 2017 the cutting edge of technology was 2400 bps modems and 300 dpi laser printers (ie a ~25 year technological 'peace handicap'). Is the actual progress we've made over that period worth the ~50 million lives lost in WW2? Put another way, would you be willing to kill 100 million people now, today, in order to take a 25 year technological shortcut (with no certainty about how well it would pan out)?
    - problems 10y ago
      I think this is sort of silly - many disruptive technological advancements have happened without causing a war. Many of the advancements you speak of had nothing to do with war time even, they were made by private companies building things like faster and faster microprocessors. Yes, war spurts technological advancement, but not in all areas - it might be more realistic to compare something like rockets or nuclear power.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      Technological changes caught WW2? A manic dictator, German resentment over Treaty of Versailles had nothing to do with it?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Exactly what were the bloody consequences of tractors or printing presses? If you just say a large number of wars/civil unrest took place during the industrial revolution then the periods before it were no less bloody.
  - RandomOpinion 10y ago
    The Luddites and the textile industry come immediately to mind. "At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
xapata 10y ago
A large middle class hasn't been around all that long in the history of civilization. Maybe it's just a flash in the pan. My guess is that computer programming will be the new blue collar manufacturing job.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  Programming isn't the new blue collar manufacturing job because you don't employ nearly as many people as you were doing manufacturing as you would be employing as computer programmers. Look at the amount of programmers at Alphabet (Google) vs people employed by Ford.
  - xapata 10y ago
    How about Infosys, Wipro, etc.? That kind of programming might employ a large number of people. I think many jobs which now only use spreadsheets for arithmetic may transform into programming jobs. Even some jobs which appear to be only words, like law, might become programming.
- lhnz 10y ago
  > In English-speaking countries, a blue-collar worker is > a working class person who performs non-agricultural > manual labour. Blue-collar work may involve skilled > or unskilled manufacturing, mining, sanitation, > custodial work, oil field work, construction, > mechanical maintenance, warehousing, firefighting, > technical installation and many other types of > physical work. > > In contrast, the white-collar worker typically > performs work in an office environment and may > involve sitting at a computer or desk. Computer programming is currently white-collar work. At what point are we going to go outside and begin to do it with our hands? Also, the nature of programming is the ability to automate away white-collar work. We're probably going to need new categories, once many of those are gone. We might end up with engineers, a service-worker class and a managerial/executive class.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    Read things less literally and you'll be less wrong.
wnevets 10y ago
>People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. were they wrong tho?
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  They weren't. All of the things the OP listed resulted in dramatic (and often very disruptive and painful) changes for the Middle Class. Personally, I hate the whole "people have been saying this forever" type dismissals. They are "mid-brow", as PG would call it: they look intelligent on the surface by giving the illusion of a broader perspective, but don't actually address the point being brought up and don't add anything to the discussion.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    I don't see how they don't address the point being brought up. They explicitly point out past scenarios where these sort of predictions were wrong. I think the peddlers of these predictions are disingenuous and intellectually lazy. If they want others to take them seriously they need to explain why their predictions don't fall under the same criticisms.
    - wycx 10y ago
      I like the idea from the CP Grey video on automation: Better technology did not make more better jobs for horses. Horses are still around, but the population peaked around the turn of the century (19th-20th). How good does automation have to get before large portions of the population find themselves in the same position as early 20th century horses.
      - problems 10y ago
        People can do mental labor. Horses can't. Automation can't.
anon987 10y ago
Scary how people can't see the technological differences between 1850 and 2017 - kinda like how climate change deniers never bring up the industrial revolution.
goda90 10y ago
Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.
- problems 10y ago
  What makes you think we're at a peak of mental productivity? For the most part the mental labor we're automating isn't actual mental labor, but physical labor things which are difficult to make a computer do - like drive, cook or stitch.
  - goda90 10y ago
    But there are mental jobs being replaced. Finance, insurance, data entry, law, etc are all being disrupted. Some slower than others, but its more the cost of hiring the software developers to replace them with automated systems than it is the technology not being ready.
    - notahacker 10y ago
      There are mental jobs being created at greater speed. Hard though it might be to believe, the desire to put things in tables and pivot them and respond to customers' sentiments in real time didn't really exist for the most part before technology made it necessary to hire people to perform those roles. And there's a whole cottage industry of people trying to find Big Data algorithm-enabled solutions to problems companies didn't think they'd have. If they actually work, sometimes, the companies that purchase them can afford to employ more sales staff...
      - StRoy 10y ago
        > There are mental jobs being created at greater speed But not of the type that most of the population could ever do, and most of HN, possibly you, seem to think it too because HN tends to support the idea that things like H1B are needed because of a shortage of tech labour. So, there are jobs created, but not the ones the local population can completely fulfill. Do you think that solves the unemployment problem? And then there is the fact that some forms of work, while they had left developed countries like the US, still existed because they were "moved" and not "destroyed", like many factory jobs that went to China, are actually now going to disappear for good, because even in a country where labor is extremely cheap, like China, automation is now on the verge of being cheaper on the long term, which leads to things like Foxconn planning to fire half of their employees (!) which also leads to the fact that any solution populists like Trump may have presumed to unemployment, like bringing back those jobs that were outsourced, may not actually work in the present age. Building iPhones in the US is not actually going to create any measurable amount of jobs in the future so it's pretty pointless. http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal... The present situation is nothing like the age of the luddites and if people don't become aware of it soon enough we might have large % of the people going unemployed, starving and potential revolutionary climates. Modern job creation is not something that can solve the problem. Ask the people who were laid off in Michigan to all become machine learning researchers? Consider this classic : > https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ > Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz". > Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution. This is with the current comp sci graduates, which are likely to be more motivated by the field than if we tried to make the entire general population attempt this kind of job. There is no good possible future for some % of the population once we enter the next stage of the automation age and start replacing jobs like truck drivers, taxis, have supermarkets like the planned Amazon Go everywhere etc. Also, think of the impact the disappearance of some jobs can have on local economies and the dominoes effect. Truck drivers, for example, are essential to many remote places. Without truck drivers stopping there their economy would break and many other jobs would die. Meanwhile large cities have massive rents and ownership costs so it's not like all these people losing jobs and living paycheck to paycheck could suddenly move to the wealthier and more active areas of the country after automation turns their place into ruins, like Detroit (not saying automation was the root cause of Detroit, but comparing the aspect of what happens when the economy of a place turns it into a literal ruin).
prodmerc 10y ago
"Forever" is before the space race, before everyone was driving instead of riding, before everyone had the Internet, TV or even radios in their home. Every step in industrialization has hurt a lot of people, and their number is increasing every time. This time it's going to be millions. I don't know if that's enough for a critical mass of sorts for some huge revolt, it may be.
- problems 10y ago
  Ultimately it's helped far more people than it's hurt. It's given us medicine, it's given us affordable food, clothing and incredible technology. To the extent that I can comfortably say I'd rather be lower class now than upper class just a few hundred years ago.
- gozur88 10y ago
  "...increasing every time."? I doubt that. I don't think we'll ever see a dislocation like we saw with agricuture in first world countries, where an occupation that employed 95%+ of the people is now done by something like 3% (depending on how you measure it).
  - prodmerc 10y ago
    Why, you're in luck I guess, that should happen again within the next two decades. Thankfully (or unfortunately?) the world is more globalized than ever, people will be moving all over the planet.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      I doubt that, too. People will continue to move from the countryside to cities within their countries, but the days of mostly open borders are probably coming to a close.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Communists are dreaming of the revolution since 1848, it never arrives.
caseysoftware 10y ago
I think one big distinction this time around is how quickly things move now. Society can shift in a few generations, no problem. In a single generation, looks challenging. But now we're talking about in the span of 5-10 years at most. We're starting to get to the point where the bottom end is bumping against how long people spend in college. As it approaches 3-5 years, what happens? How quickly can people shift, retrain, and re-educate themselves for the new tools, concepts, or fields that are now open to them? I don't think anyone has any answers.. but it's a line of reasoning we should explore.
multinglets 10y ago
Yeah, so describe how you think the middle class is doing these days.
SilasX 10y ago
Right, but there really are dangers that fail to materialize until they do. That's not a reason to dismiss every danger that has always so failed.
pygy_ 10y ago
Tell that to the surplus horses that bootstrapped the pet food industry when Ford democratized cars...
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  They got jobs in the glue factory. ;)
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Parallel career paths!
waffleau 10y ago
From a historical perspective your reservation is totally fair. But I think the issue is a lot more complex than just looking at the impact automation has had in the past. Here are a few points worth mulling over: 1. Automation in the past has been good at increasing worker productivity, and making new avenues of work possible. This is true going forward too. But each new generation of technology isn't "something we've seen before", it's a new thing with new consequences. Technological development isn't cyclical, so estimating the impact a new technology will have on the impact previous technologies have had is a poor model. This isn't to say the consequences will be bad, just that they're hard to anticipate. For the most part, the historical perspective is probably right though. 2. Automation in the past has been very effective in improving worker productivity, but developments in AI and robotics are looking at ways to supplant workers (i.e. electric cars don't improve our ability to drive, it removes our need for drivers). While in the broad sense this trend is good, and people will over time shift into new industries, it is going to be disruptive. Timelines will have a big impact on the shock. New industries won't spring up over night. 3. The timeline for this level of automation is much shorter than previous automation trends. The shift in agriculture happened over generations. The shift caused by driverless cars will likely happen in less than a decade. Add to that the efficiency of market pressures we have today - once one business is able to shift entirely to an autonomous fleet and save money over their competitors, all their competitors will have to follow suite to remain competitive. Entire industries could be displaced, and those workers will need to move somewhere. 4. This is more hypothetical and longer term, but it gets at what I think is the general fear around automation. Imagine we develop the ability to automate any unskilled job (whether through broad automation improvements or development of an actual general-purpose automaton). The primary factor in whether a business would choose to employ that automaton over a human is cost. The automaton is a once-off fixed cost, whereas a human is an ongoing cost. Once the cost of the automation is lower than paying a salary, humans will no longer be employed in that role. 5. Following from this, if it's the unskilled jobs that get automated, where do those workers go? At this stage, even if automation is creating new lines of work, why wouldn't that work also be automated? Basically, once we automate unskilled work, we never need unskilled workers again. In order to find work they'll need to skill up, which takes time and money. And if it takes a year to train a worker to a level that they're a net benefit, why not invest that money instead into automating the skilled work too?

anigbrowl 10y ago

It would be facile to ignore the massive and frequently bloody consequences of such previous economic disruptions. People didn't just go through a period of anxiety and then drift into new jobs and feel content again during previous industrial revolutions.

lend000 10y ago
You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society. Sure, governments could have banned the printing press and stayed in the dark ages (scribes would still be making a good living, though.) Edit: it all depends on tone... I still read the comment with the tone that implies disruptions as being as negative as they are positive, whereas I would frame disruptions are more positive. Granted, that's not to ignore the countless people who have had their lives uprooted by not being able to keep up with fast moving societies.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  That's not how I read the comment. I read it as admitting that both things can be (and probably are) true: these sorts of disruptions can be awful and bloody for the people living through them and can also be a net benefit to society. It's looking like we may very well be those people who will be living through the next one of these, so it's reasonable for us to be worried about the awfulness of the transition.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > You frame the disruptions as if they were not a net benefit to society I don't think he does, though. I'd be much quicker to say that other people frame the disruptions as though they never had significant downsides; I constantly see people saying "most people found new work eventually without too much of a pay cut" as though that implies no one suffered. More theoretically, we ought to be capable of imagining some net-positive change which causes front-end disruptions so devastating that we can't endure through to the positive result. Imagine rendering 50% of people unemployed in one year and ask whether they would all quietly drift into new jobs, or whether they would set all the data centers on fire and cancel out the progress. I don't think things are that bad, but pretending a long-run positive exempts you from planning for short-run harms is pretty unfair.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I agree with you about the net benefit in purely economic terms, but it's easy to overweight the benefit when you were born after the costs were paid. Industrialization of production also inevitably led to the industrialization of warfare and we know how that turned out. I can't say with any certainty that we're definitely better off than if WW2 had never happened. Suppose it had not, and that there had been slower technological development without the necessity of war, so that in 2017 the cutting edge of technology was 2400 bps modems and 300 dpi laser printers (ie a ~25 year technological 'peace handicap'). Is the actual progress we've made over that period worth the ~50 million lives lost in WW2? Put another way, would you be willing to kill 100 million people now, today, in order to take a 25 year technological shortcut (with no certainty about how well it would pan out)?
  - problems 10y ago
    I think this is sort of silly - many disruptive technological advancements have happened without causing a war. Many of the advancements you speak of had nothing to do with war time even, they were made by private companies building things like faster and faster microprocessors. Yes, war spurts technological advancement, but not in all areas - it might be more realistic to compare something like rockets or nuclear power.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Technological changes caught WW2? A manic dictator, German resentment over Treaty of Versailles had nothing to do with it?
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Exactly what were the bloody consequences of tractors or printing presses? If you just say a large number of wars/civil unrest took place during the industrial revolution then the periods before it were no less bloody.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  The Luddites and the textile industry come immediately to mind. "At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

xapata 10y ago

A large middle class hasn't been around all that long in the history of civilization. Maybe it's just a flash in the pan. My guess is that computer programming will be the new blue collar manufacturing job.

zitterbewegung 10y ago
Programming isn't the new blue collar manufacturing job because you don't employ nearly as many people as you were doing manufacturing as you would be employing as computer programmers. Look at the amount of programmers at Alphabet (Google) vs people employed by Ford.
- xapata 10y ago
  How about Infosys, Wipro, etc.? That kind of programming might employ a large number of people. I think many jobs which now only use spreadsheets for arithmetic may transform into programming jobs. Even some jobs which appear to be only words, like law, might become programming.
lhnz 10y ago
> In English-speaking countries, a blue-collar worker is > a working class person who performs non-agricultural > manual labour. Blue-collar work may involve skilled > or unskilled manufacturing, mining, sanitation, > custodial work, oil field work, construction, > mechanical maintenance, warehousing, firefighting, > technical installation and many other types of > physical work. > > In contrast, the white-collar worker typically > performs work in an office environment and may > involve sitting at a computer or desk. Computer programming is currently white-collar work. At what point are we going to go outside and begin to do it with our hands? Also, the nature of programming is the ability to automate away white-collar work. We're probably going to need new categories, once many of those are gone. We might end up with engineers, a service-worker class and a managerial/executive class.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Read things less literally and you'll be less wrong.

wnevets 10y ago

>People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular. were they wrong tho?

enraged_camel 10y ago
They weren't. All of the things the OP listed resulted in dramatic (and often very disruptive and painful) changes for the Middle Class. Personally, I hate the whole "people have been saying this forever" type dismissals. They are "mid-brow", as PG would call it: they look intelligent on the surface by giving the illusion of a broader perspective, but don't actually address the point being brought up and don't add anything to the discussion.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  I don't see how they don't address the point being brought up. They explicitly point out past scenarios where these sort of predictions were wrong. I think the peddlers of these predictions are disingenuous and intellectually lazy. If they want others to take them seriously they need to explain why their predictions don't fall under the same criticisms.
  - wycx 10y ago
    I like the idea from the CP Grey video on automation: Better technology did not make more better jobs for horses. Horses are still around, but the population peaked around the turn of the century (19th-20th). How good does automation have to get before large portions of the population find themselves in the same position as early 20th century horses.
    - problems 10y ago
      People can do mental labor. Horses can't. Automation can't.

anon987 10y ago

Scary how people can't see the technological differences between 1850 and 2017 - kinda like how climate change deniers never bring up the industrial revolution.

goda90 10y ago

Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.

problems 10y ago
What makes you think we're at a peak of mental productivity? For the most part the mental labor we're automating isn't actual mental labor, but physical labor things which are difficult to make a computer do - like drive, cook or stitch.
- goda90 10y ago
  But there are mental jobs being replaced. Finance, insurance, data entry, law, etc are all being disrupted. Some slower than others, but its more the cost of hiring the software developers to replace them with automated systems than it is the technology not being ready.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    There are mental jobs being created at greater speed. Hard though it might be to believe, the desire to put things in tables and pivot them and respond to customers' sentiments in real time didn't really exist for the most part before technology made it necessary to hire people to perform those roles. And there's a whole cottage industry of people trying to find Big Data algorithm-enabled solutions to problems companies didn't think they'd have. If they actually work, sometimes, the companies that purchase them can afford to employ more sales staff...
    - StRoy 10y ago
      > There are mental jobs being created at greater speed But not of the type that most of the population could ever do, and most of HN, possibly you, seem to think it too because HN tends to support the idea that things like H1B are needed because of a shortage of tech labour. So, there are jobs created, but not the ones the local population can completely fulfill. Do you think that solves the unemployment problem? And then there is the fact that some forms of work, while they had left developed countries like the US, still existed because they were "moved" and not "destroyed", like many factory jobs that went to China, are actually now going to disappear for good, because even in a country where labor is extremely cheap, like China, automation is now on the verge of being cheaper on the long term, which leads to things like Foxconn planning to fire half of their employees (!) which also leads to the fact that any solution populists like Trump may have presumed to unemployment, like bringing back those jobs that were outsourced, may not actually work in the present age. Building iPhones in the US is not actually going to create any measurable amount of jobs in the future so it's pretty pointless. http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal... The present situation is nothing like the age of the luddites and if people don't become aware of it soon enough we might have large % of the people going unemployed, starving and potential revolutionary climates. Modern job creation is not something that can solve the problem. Ask the people who were laid off in Michigan to all become machine learning researchers? Consider this classic : > https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ > Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz". > Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution. This is with the current comp sci graduates, which are likely to be more motivated by the field than if we tried to make the entire general population attempt this kind of job. There is no good possible future for some % of the population once we enter the next stage of the automation age and start replacing jobs like truck drivers, taxis, have supermarkets like the planned Amazon Go everywhere etc. Also, think of the impact the disappearance of some jobs can have on local economies and the dominoes effect. Truck drivers, for example, are essential to many remote places. Without truck drivers stopping there their economy would break and many other jobs would die. Meanwhile large cities have massive rents and ownership costs so it's not like all these people losing jobs and living paycheck to paycheck could suddenly move to the wealthier and more active areas of the country after automation turns their place into ruins, like Detroit (not saying automation was the root cause of Detroit, but comparing the aspect of what happens when the economy of a place turns it into a literal ruin).

prodmerc 10y ago

"Forever" is before the space race, before everyone was driving instead of riding, before everyone had the Internet, TV or even radios in their home. Every step in industrialization has hurt a lot of people, and their number is increasing every time. This time it's going to be millions. I don't know if that's enough for a critical mass of sorts for some huge revolt, it may be.

problems 10y ago
Ultimately it's helped far more people than it's hurt. It's given us medicine, it's given us affordable food, clothing and incredible technology. To the extent that I can comfortably say I'd rather be lower class now than upper class just a few hundred years ago.
gozur88 10y ago
"...increasing every time."? I doubt that. I don't think we'll ever see a dislocation like we saw with agricuture in first world countries, where an occupation that employed 95%+ of the people is now done by something like 3% (depending on how you measure it).
- prodmerc 10y ago
  Why, you're in luck I guess, that should happen again within the next two decades. Thankfully (or unfortunately?) the world is more globalized than ever, people will be moving all over the planet.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    I doubt that, too. People will continue to move from the countryside to cities within their countries, but the days of mostly open borders are probably coming to a close.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Communists are dreaming of the revolution since 1848, it never arrives.

caseysoftware 10y ago

I think one big distinction this time around is how quickly things move now. Society can shift in a few generations, no problem. In a single generation, looks challenging. But now we're talking about in the span of 5-10 years at most. We're starting to get to the point where the bottom end is bumping against how long people spend in college. As it approaches 3-5 years, what happens? How quickly can people shift, retrain, and re-educate themselves for the new tools, concepts, or fields that are now open to them? I don't think anyone has any answers.. but it's a line of reasoning we should explore.

multinglets 10y ago

Yeah, so describe how you think the middle class is doing these days.

SilasX 10y ago

Right, but there really are dangers that fail to materialize until they do. That's not a reason to dismiss every danger that has always so failed.

pygy_ 10y ago

Tell that to the surplus horses that bootstrapped the pet food industry when Ford democratized cars...

maverick_iceman 10y ago
They got jobs in the glue factory. ;)
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Parallel career paths!

waffleau 10y ago

From a historical perspective your reservation is totally fair. But I think the issue is a lot more complex than just looking at the impact automation has had in the past. Here are a few points worth mulling over: 1. Automation in the past has been good at increasing worker productivity, and making new avenues of work possible. This is true going forward too. But each new generation of technology isn't "something we've seen before", it's a new thing with new consequences. Technological development isn't cyclical, so estimating the impact a new technology will have on the impact previous technologies have had is a poor model. This isn't to say the consequences will be bad, just that they're hard to anticipate. For the most part, the historical perspective is probably right though. 2. Automation in the past has been very effective in improving worker productivity, but developments in AI and robotics are looking at ways to supplant workers (i.e. electric cars don't improve our ability to drive, it removes our need for drivers). While in the broad sense this trend is good, and people will over time shift into new industries, it is going to be disruptive. Timelines will have a big impact on the shock. New industries won't spring up over night. 3. The timeline for this level of automation is much shorter than previous automation trends. The shift in agriculture happened over generations. The shift caused by driverless cars will likely happen in less than a decade. Add to that the efficiency of market pressures we have today - once one business is able to shift entirely to an autonomous fleet and save money over their competitors, all their competitors will have to follow suite to remain competitive. Entire industries could be displaced, and those workers will need to move somewhere. 4. This is more hypothetical and longer term, but it gets at what I think is the general fear around automation. Imagine we develop the ability to automate any unskilled job (whether through broad automation improvements or development of an actual general-purpose automaton). The primary factor in whether a business would choose to employ that automaton over a human is cost. The automaton is a once-off fixed cost, whereas a human is an ongoing cost. Once the cost of the automation is lower than paying a salary, humans will no longer be employed in that role. 5. Following from this, if it's the unskilled jobs that get automated, where do those workers go? At this stage, even if automation is creating new lines of work, why wouldn't that work also be automated? Basically, once we automate unskilled work, we never need unskilled workers again. In order to find work they'll need to skill up, which takes time and money. And if it takes a year to train a worker to a level that they're a net benefit, why not invest that money instead into automating the skilled work too?