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An article somewhere had a useful categorizaiton of automation of jobs in terms of human jobs 1) Automation removes a bottleneck, and lets workers be more prod

An article somewhere had a useful categorizaiton of automation of jobs in terms of human jobs 1) Automation removes a bottleneck, and lets workers be more productive - often creating more work. 2) Automation removes a better paying job, and leaves behind a less skilled role for humans 3) Automation removes an entire type of work. Automation doomsday scenarios focus on the last work. The issue with automation, fundamentally ties down with the ability to transfer people to other roles if they suffer from automation of types 2 and 3. But as I have pointed out elsewhere, and economists also admit - retraining is not really an option. For someone to change tack and learn an entirely new set of skills is more than slightly challenging on its own. Let alone with the tensions of losing a job and having to take care of a family with their time needs. The weakpoint in the larger economic model is retraining.

Qwertious 9y ago
>1) Automation removes a bottleneck, and lets workers be more productive - often creating more work. What's not mentioned is that on average, the work created will be more skilled than the work it displaces. This means that in the long term, training [enough to get a job] is harder, because more and more work will require skill. In the long run, I suspect that the biggest unskilled job group will be the type that involves interacting with people (so, management and retail/sales), which could well end up being where we ditch as many of our unskilled workers that we've made redundant, unless we can manage to remove them from the economy with e.g. UBI. And oh my god, did I just stumble across that one part of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?