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> Unless demand also rises tremendously because costs plummet, which it may for some things, but surely won't for all. Maybe, maybe not. Demand has always rise

> Unless demand also rises tremendously because costs plummet, which it may for some things, but surely won't for all. Maybe, maybe not. Demand has always risen in the past. Historically 90+% of us were manual agricultural labors, generally unfree at that (i.e., serfs or slaves). Nowadays machines do almost all that work, yet we don't have anything like 90% unemployment (yeah, there are still farmers, but not 90%... plus the farmer isn't grubbing in the ground with a stick in the blazing sun, Mesopotamia-style. He's riding in an air-conditioned combine harvester with a fridge full of tasty beverages and an internet connection).

yamtaddle 3y ago
We've absorbed a lot of workers into lengthier education and various jobs programs (the MIC and the military itself; in the US, the horribly-inefficient healthcare sector) at enormous cost, following suspiciously well with the timeline of eliminating many of those other jobs. Would the US have seen such a great postwar boom if we'd disarmed again, or would unemployment have shot back up? What if we'd not had the GI bill to stick a bunch of 22-year-old ex-GIs in college for a while, keeping them out of the workforce? If a four-year degree hadn't become the new high school diploma, and wasteful healthcare spending not expanded and funded tens of thousands of jobs that aren't a net-benefit to society, right around the time computers began automating away a lot of jobs? I wonder. IMO we're paying through the nose to keep all this automation from being a disaster, we're just doing it in ways that aren't as obvious as an outright, robust welfare program.