3 ms·
How many people will be employed by the companies that replace all these low-wage low-skilled jobs? What will those formerly low-wage low-skilled laborers do af
by losteric 9y ago
How many people will be employed by the companies that replace all these low-wage low-skilled jobs? What will those formerly low-wage low-skilled laborers do after they are replaced? Buy a college education? Learn robotics?
As those jobs are automated, who will patronize those businesses? eg what fraction of McDonalds customers are high-income high-skill laborers vs lower-wage low-skill?
- ashelmire 9y agoFew, study and get news jobs, maybe, maybe. There are always more jobs and opportunity for growth (even in a bad economy). The companies will evolve or die as they always have if their customer base disappears.
- losteric 9y agoI guess my questions boil down to this: Human cognitive abilities follow a normal distribution. Some low-skilled laborers never had an opportunity to reach their potential, others lack the capacity to perform higher skill jobs... and some people are incapable of even "low-skill" labor. Is automation maintaining or reducing the number of jobs for less capable people? Are we slowly raising the unemployable-threshold?
- ashelmire 9y agoThose are good questions. Our challenge becomes ensuring that people are capable. How many of those displaced workers are less capable because of something intrinsic (some mental defect or insufficiency), and how many just need to be trained? I'm not sure if we'll ever reach a point where the "average" person is unemployable, but we can imagine a future where that is the case. But there's such little genetic variation within humanity that it seems likely that our education system could be made much more rigorous and suitable to ensure that everyone comes out of it at a very high level of capability.