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Certain jobs sure. And we're not there yet. Of course once full automation exists there won't be any jobs anymore. You will also find that Malthusian explosion

Certain jobs sure. And we're not there yet. Of course once full automation exists there won't be any jobs anymore. You will also find that Malthusian explosions don't actually happen among humans. See the declining birth rates across much of the first world.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
You are right. But if we see declining resources and many of them non renewable, we are worse off. Water comes to mind. phosphorus in Ag ..arable land, rare mineral/metal mining for our electronics/batteries etc. even sand that is ferried around by intl sand mafias is non renewable. Think of the impact of our population vs resources as a ratio rather than a number. The realization is chilling. But back to jobs. Yes..you are right again. But also, jobs that are based on materials consumption(mentioned earlier in this reply) and that can be automated will become smaller vs service/personal interaction industry that will explode. AWS is one such example. As another example: remember when we had cameras? There was a whole industry revolving around cameras, lenses, printing, developing films and then digital media. Now, we have our multitasking camera..it’s uploaded to the cloud and we can view it on an electronic device. How many jobs would have disappeared? All over the world because of this transition. How many new photo memories have been created because photography became part of our mobile phone? It has increased while jobs have also increased. Do we really need facial recognition to sort photos in our smart phone? But some guy in Apple or google or Facebook is trying to figure out how to teach AI to group similar looking facial features after recognizing them as same. An entire class of job has been created..one that did not exist just twenty years ago. They are higher paying jobs. And arguably more people are employed in this new post smart phone world than during Konica film time. More and more goods are becoming virtual and becoming cheaper to produce and consume. But because of the sheer volume, we can still keep up with creating jobs of this kind. However we can’t increase the amount of food or water or dairy milk. Tangible goods will become scarcer and those jobs will disappear. The essentials can never be expensive. Let’s hope water and food is affordable to all in the coming centuries. Which means some sectors necessarily will have to be automated and aligned sectors will also have to be automated. (Example: food production and food supply chain..if one is cheap and the other is expensive, the house of cards falls down). So yes, you are right. It is only applicable for certain jobs. But we can also expand consumption of these to keep revenue and margins up. Example: we can sign up for Facebook as well as YouTube. We can have WhatsApp as well as signal. So the jobs for those qualified to work there will continue to exist even if population increases or more jobs are created. The future will likely have advertised goods that are virtual than real. Maybe online ads for a video game than a bone china teaset. So we can look forward to shortages of real goods due to population pressure/resource scarcity. Here is where margins will have to be maintained to continue getting essentials out to the public. Like food, fiber and material goods etc. But we can also expect service sector booming and employment. And that can be endless employment. Now we will starting running on the Red Queen’s macro economic treadmill. Prices chasing wages chasing employment chasing wages chasing prices. It is like paying someone to whitewash a wall and then paying someone to spray graffiti and then hiring someone to whitewash it again just so everyone gets a chance to make some change and earn some money. That is the future we are looking at... If we can manipulate currency and money market..with man made constructs, why play the charade of mandatory 40 hour work weeks? The only reason to carry on would be to generate money for the govt in the form of taxes. If we embrace automation fully and lesser working hours and eliminate all taxes except on consumption, we will at least have happy human beings. And happy Homo sapiens will likely be less inclined..than those participating in exhausting rat races...to get into conflict situations. This will become important as we will most certainly be facing resource scarcity...esp of non renewable resources.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  You're making a lot of points which I can't answer right now. But I'd say that resources are vastly more than people realize. The entire mass of the Earth is the available resources at our disposal. We just don't have the tech to harvest them. For example, absorbing water from the air, the sea, melting ice caps etc, we can only harvest from fresh water sources but there's no theoretical reason why we can't harvest from these other sources. So I don't really worry about finite resources, as long as tech improves there are basically infinite resources, assuming that we can't get through the entire mass of the planet.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    I respectfully disagree. Resource abundance is a myth. Extraction of resources itself is highly energy expensive and wasteful not to mention that many non renewable resources are what fuels our basic needs. To give a simple example: the daily bowl of oatmeal. From farms out of the farm gate to processing to point of sale, the entire supply chain runs on fossil fuel. Ag is entirely fueled by fossil fuels. If we magically erase the existence of fossil fuels that is a non renewable resource tomorrow, we will all starve. We might not die at once, but our access to almost everything we need to survive would be blocked. And that’s just one example of non renewable resource. I also mentioned soil Phosphorus that is limited..and also sand that is non renewable and used extensively for construction. Water and arable land that is needed for everything from timber to food to fiber. Mining etc. Unless we have a drastic paradigm shift and we tap into some kind of Tesla’esque ‘Free Energy’, we are living off savings instead of capital.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      My point is that with technology advancing, the total theoretical amount of energy we can use is at least the Earth's mass. This is predicating on technology increasing of course.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        Energy density can't be ignored here. Fossil fuels are definitely finite, and few things match their energy density and general utility. Our environment is warming, and we need to bootstrap ourselves onto other energy now, while we have fuels and quick or we may find ourselves energy constrained and fighting the battle in a far less livable place.
ddingus 6y ago
There will always be basic labors. I feel valuing these more will help the scenario play out better for everyone. Care takers, laborers of all kinds, plumbers, you get the idea. We all get old. Want your care from the lowest bidder, or worn to the bone family, or from people secure enough for it to be a labor of love, compassion? The lowest bidder may care, as will the frazzled family. But acting on that may not turn out how everyone intends.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  I never said anything about only using the lowest priced service? Of course I'd want higher quality service, not sure what your point is here.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Who said it was about you? Some of us will pay nicely. A majority won't. Can't due to cost and lack of availability. Valuing those basic labors higher is a direct economic stimulus. Demand backed by real dollars. People need enough to buy the stuff, or they don't buy the stuff. Same for services. High automation, without valuing basic labors well = lower demand = less money available to profit = lack of demand for automation.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      If you replied to my comment in a comment chain, I'd assume it's directly addressing my comment. Otherwise a top level comment suffices. I don't understand your last point, why would there be lower demand for high automation? What do you mean "valuing basic labors well" in the context of automation?
      - ddingus 6y ago
        If profit is the motive for automation, what happens when people have less or no income? Who buys the product so automated?

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

You are right. But if we see declining resources and many of them non renewable, we are worse off. Water comes to mind. phosphorus in Ag ..arable land, rare mineral/metal mining for our electronics/batteries etc. even sand that is ferried around by intl sand mafias is non renewable. Think of the impact of our population vs resources as a ratio rather than a number. The realization is chilling. But back to jobs. Yes..you are right again. But also, jobs that are based on materials consumption(mentioned earlier in this reply) and that can be automated will become smaller vs service/personal interaction industry that will explode. AWS is one such example. As another example: remember when we had cameras? There was a whole industry revolving around cameras, lenses, printing, developing films and then digital media. Now, we have our multitasking camera..it’s uploaded to the cloud and we can view it on an electronic device. How many jobs would have disappeared? All over the world because of this transition. How many new photo memories have been created because photography became part of our mobile phone? It has increased while jobs have also increased. Do we really need facial recognition to sort photos in our smart phone? But some guy in Apple or google or Facebook is trying to figure out how to teach AI to group similar looking facial features after recognizing them as same. An entire class of job has been created..one that did not exist just twenty years ago. They are higher paying jobs. And arguably more people are employed in this new post smart phone world than during Konica film time. More and more goods are becoming virtual and becoming cheaper to produce and consume. But because of the sheer volume, we can still keep up with creating jobs of this kind. However we can’t increase the amount of food or water or dairy milk. Tangible goods will become scarcer and those jobs will disappear. The essentials can never be expensive. Let’s hope water and food is affordable to all in the coming centuries. Which means some sectors necessarily will have to be automated and aligned sectors will also have to be automated. (Example: food production and food supply chain..if one is cheap and the other is expensive, the house of cards falls down). So yes, you are right. It is only applicable for certain jobs. But we can also expand consumption of these to keep revenue and margins up. Example: we can sign up for Facebook as well as YouTube. We can have WhatsApp as well as signal. So the jobs for those qualified to work there will continue to exist even if population increases or more jobs are created. The future will likely have advertised goods that are virtual than real. Maybe online ads for a video game than a bone china teaset. So we can look forward to shortages of real goods due to population pressure/resource scarcity. Here is where margins will have to be maintained to continue getting essentials out to the public. Like food, fiber and material goods etc. But we can also expect service sector booming and employment. And that can be endless employment. Now we will starting running on the Red Queen’s macro economic treadmill. Prices chasing wages chasing employment chasing wages chasing prices. It is like paying someone to whitewash a wall and then paying someone to spray graffiti and then hiring someone to whitewash it again just so everyone gets a chance to make some change and earn some money. That is the future we are looking at... If we can manipulate currency and money market..with man made constructs, why play the charade of mandatory 40 hour work weeks? The only reason to carry on would be to generate money for the govt in the form of taxes. If we embrace automation fully and lesser working hours and eliminate all taxes except on consumption, we will at least have happy human beings. And happy Homo sapiens will likely be less inclined..than those participating in exhausting rat races...to get into conflict situations. This will become important as we will most certainly be facing resource scarcity...esp of non renewable resources.

cercatrova 6y ago
You're making a lot of points which I can't answer right now. But I'd say that resources are vastly more than people realize. The entire mass of the Earth is the available resources at our disposal. We just don't have the tech to harvest them. For example, absorbing water from the air, the sea, melting ice caps etc, we can only harvest from fresh water sources but there's no theoretical reason why we can't harvest from these other sources. So I don't really worry about finite resources, as long as tech improves there are basically infinite resources, assuming that we can't get through the entire mass of the planet.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  I respectfully disagree. Resource abundance is a myth. Extraction of resources itself is highly energy expensive and wasteful not to mention that many non renewable resources are what fuels our basic needs. To give a simple example: the daily bowl of oatmeal. From farms out of the farm gate to processing to point of sale, the entire supply chain runs on fossil fuel. Ag is entirely fueled by fossil fuels. If we magically erase the existence of fossil fuels that is a non renewable resource tomorrow, we will all starve. We might not die at once, but our access to almost everything we need to survive would be blocked. And that’s just one example of non renewable resource. I also mentioned soil Phosphorus that is limited..and also sand that is non renewable and used extensively for construction. Water and arable land that is needed for everything from timber to food to fiber. Mining etc. Unless we have a drastic paradigm shift and we tap into some kind of Tesla’esque ‘Free Energy’, we are living off savings instead of capital.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    My point is that with technology advancing, the total theoretical amount of energy we can use is at least the Earth's mass. This is predicating on technology increasing of course.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Energy density can't be ignored here. Fossil fuels are definitely finite, and few things match their energy density and general utility. Our environment is warming, and we need to bootstrap ourselves onto other energy now, while we have fuels and quick or we may find ourselves energy constrained and fighting the battle in a far less livable place.

ddingus 6y ago

There will always be basic labors. I feel valuing these more will help the scenario play out better for everyone. Care takers, laborers of all kinds, plumbers, you get the idea. We all get old. Want your care from the lowest bidder, or worn to the bone family, or from people secure enough for it to be a labor of love, compassion? The lowest bidder may care, as will the frazzled family. But acting on that may not turn out how everyone intends.

cercatrova 6y ago
I never said anything about only using the lowest priced service? Of course I'd want higher quality service, not sure what your point is here.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Who said it was about you? Some of us will pay nicely. A majority won't. Can't due to cost and lack of availability. Valuing those basic labors higher is a direct economic stimulus. Demand backed by real dollars. People need enough to buy the stuff, or they don't buy the stuff. Same for services. High automation, without valuing basic labors well = lower demand = less money available to profit = lack of demand for automation.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    If you replied to my comment in a comment chain, I'd assume it's directly addressing my comment. Otherwise a top level comment suffices. I don't understand your last point, why would there be lower demand for high automation? What do you mean "valuing basic labors well" in the context of automation?
    - ddingus 6y ago
      If profit is the motive for automation, what happens when people have less or no income? Who buys the product so automated?