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How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas her

How is this true? 100 years ago there was virtually nobody employed doing purely intellectual work, yet this has grown to be a huge labor market. Your ideas here kind of trail off to be "The Bell Curve"-ish. Many of these "unskilled laborers" will instead find work in service industries and the arts. For an HN-geared example: look at what Ruby on Rails, Django, etc has done for web development. It allows web developers to significantly increase output without extra cost or significant externalities, lowering production costs and freeing capital to be spent more efficiently. The market for developers hasn't crashed through the floor though. If anything, it's increased, because of reduced overheads, the value that can be delivered has increased.

cageface 16y ago
There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time as more manual work is automated and a larger fraction of the population moves into intellectual work. The more pessimistic scenario is that the underclass population explodes into poverty and anarchy and eventually brings the affluent elites down with it.
- rbranson 16y ago
  I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge. Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account? There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it. The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.
- dasil003 16y ago
  It's entirely possible that we could move to entirely IP jobs. Why not? If all our physical needs are taken care of, we could became gainfully employed in the metaverse, or maybe just end up as a bunch of WALL-E-style couch potatoes. It's probably ultimately a more likely direction than an unending escalation in widget production. There's also the question of what percentage of the population would be suited to these IP jobs, but geeks are getting more action than ever before, so I think the population will shift in that direction as well.
- philwelch 16y ago
  "The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small." This sounds a lot like an agricultural-age person saying "the number of people making a real living in manufacturing will remain very small". If all physical goods are really cheap enough, you don't need to earn that much as an artist to afford them.
  - nradov 16y ago
    The art most people can produce is worth exactly zero.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      That's a very cynical assumption--how do you figure that?

cageface 16y ago

There may be a net gain of IP jobs in the future but are we going to find anywhere close to 5 billion of them? Service jobs will decline over time too as more and more of them are automated out of existence. When was the last time you actually went into a bank? The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small. The optimistic scenario is that world population self-regulates down over time as more manual work is automated and a larger fraction of the population moves into intellectual work. The more pessimistic scenario is that the underclass population explodes into poverty and anarchy and eventually brings the affluent elites down with it.

rbranson 16y ago
I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge. Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account? There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it. The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.
dasil003 16y ago
It's entirely possible that we could move to entirely IP jobs. Why not? If all our physical needs are taken care of, we could became gainfully employed in the metaverse, or maybe just end up as a bunch of WALL-E-style couch potatoes. It's probably ultimately a more likely direction than an unending escalation in widget production. There's also the question of what percentage of the population would be suited to these IP jobs, but geeks are getting more action than ever before, so I think the population will shift in that direction as well.
philwelch 16y ago
"The number of people making a real living in the arts will remain very small." This sounds a lot like an agricultural-age person saying "the number of people making a real living in manufacturing will remain very small". If all physical goods are really cheap enough, you don't need to earn that much as an artist to afford them.
- nradov 16y ago
  The art most people can produce is worth exactly zero.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    That's a very cynical assumption--how do you figure that?