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~70% of Indians are still farmers vs ~2% in the US. Would you recommend India adopt UBI before they discover the tractor and 68% of their country becomes unempl

~70% of Indians are still farmers vs ~2% in the US. Would you recommend India adopt UBI before they discover the tractor and 68% of their country becomes unemployed? What about the seamstresses destroyed by the invention of the sewing machine? Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "Technology X will destroy job Y" that has been around for literally hundreds of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history or economics. The self driving truck is no different than the sewing machine.

crowbahr 6y ago
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The rate of automation is increasing. Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "It's always been this way therefore it will always be this way" that has been around for literally thousands of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history. To dismiss fear of automation as some resurgence of ludditism is reductive in the extreme. We already see examples of automation killing jobs and seeing workers turned out on their ear because their jobs have been automated. It's called the Rust Belt for a reason. The manufacturing jobs didn't just skip off to Mexico and China: they were automated away as well. The USA manufactures more now than it did in the 80s, but factory jobs are far fewer. Most of those factory workers now live off of benefits and Walmart, because their jobs disappeared, driving the income disparity. The US middle class is dying from automation but you blithely claim "hey at least they're still getting McDonald's jobs".