4 ms·

Contrasting 200 years with the 4th industrial revolution(s) seems erroneous.

• valuearb 6y ago
  It’s not 200 years, it’s the entire history of the human race. Automation produces wealthier societies by improving their productivity. Every single time automation has done this it’s eliminated jobs, yet replaced them with better ones. If you demonstrated the personal computer with a spreadsheet to bankers and accountants in the late 70s, they could easily see the jobs that these terrible new automation tools would destroy, but few could predict the jobs they’d create. When plows, combines, tractors came to farming, each time it was easy to see what jobs were no longer necessary. But it was impossible to know what jobs would be created. Each of these tools made food cheaper and more plentiful, freeing more disposable income to be spent on new products and inventions that created better jobs than the ones we lost. It’s arrogant to think that after this has happened thousands of times, that our time is any different. Or to pretend that the clarity we see the jobs we will lose to robots is something new, and that our inability to forsee new jobs to replace them somehow means that this time there won’t be any. We’ve never been able to foresee them but they always will come. If robots make things cheaper and better, those savings will create new products, markets and jobs. And if they don’t, robots won’t steal anyone’s job.
  • partingshots 6y ago
    First, our muscles were replaced. But that was alright because we could still use our minds. What happens though when our minds become obsolete as well? There’s nothing left to transition to.