> "and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs" You've found one right here. Not all softwar

> "and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs" You've found one right here. Not all software destroys jobs, but much of it certainly does. More often than not this destruction is a net positive for society - but it tends to create localized minima that are hard to resolve. In less abstract speech: by using software to destroy jobs we create more jobs that ostensibly have a greater positive impact to society, but that's really very little comfort to the auto plant worker in Michigan, or the call center agent in Minnesota, or the travel agent in California, most of whom are severely underqualified for these new jobs, and have no reasonable way of becoming qualified. Humans are not discrete units of productivity - specializations, experience, education, intelligence, all of which exist as substantial barriers in making humans easily interchangeable. One cannot reasonably take the position of "relax! we won't even remember this in 100 years", even though it is true. While society will recover from these periods of change, you still have millions of unemployed, hungry, desperate people at your door step right now, and you will have to face that problem regardless. > "Automation has never created poverty or starvation." Are you serious? "Automation has never created a net decrease in productivity in the long term (measured in decades)" is probably more accurate. If you want to see automation creating poverty and starvation just go to the rust belt in this country. Go to Detroit and see the boarded up houses, the burned out husks of neighborhoods, and then try to say with a straight face "automation has never created poverty or starvation". Whenever this topic comes up on HN (and elsewhere) the response is invariably highly binary. Either automation is a noble advancement with no negative effects, or automation is a complete evil that destroys people. Both views are equally ridiculous. Automation is an inevitable fact that is, in the long term, a positive for society - but it creates very significant localized destruction for substantial amounts of time (measured in terms of human life). The ignorance of that last part is dangerous. Automation has already put millions out of work just in this country alone, and will continue to put more people out of work. There are substantial gaps between the unemployed and the new classes of jobs that are being created, and bridging this gap is neither inevitable, nor trivial, nor will the magic of unbridled capitalism solve it automatically. It is a tremendous social issue that faces every society on this planet, and it should not be trivialized.