Being a cook isn't (necessarily) unskilled labor. Neither is being a hairdresser, a personal shopper, a sommelier, or a yoga instructor. You can make a very re

Being a cook isn't (necessarily) unskilled labor. Neither is being a hairdresser, a personal shopper, a sommelier, or a yoga instructor. You can make a very respectable income today in the U.S. at any of those jobs if you're sufficiently skilled. Certainly there are many more people doing those jobs today than there were a hundred years ago. And frankly, many of them would probably much rather be doing such a "personal service" job over their career options of decades ago. And that's not counting plumbers, electricians, carpenters... Many of whom find it much easier to develop recurring revenue streams than your typical YC startup! Automation is great. It helps most of those people. Just think about how much your local yoga studio or coffee shop relies on modern PoS systems for payment processing and customer tracking, the web and social media for marketing, Amazon-class logistics for supplies... I just don't see things in such negative terms. I also don't think that today's rates of unemployment were somehow inevitable. We automated like mad in the '90's too (arguably even more dramatically than we are doing so today), and yet unemployment dropped, incomes rose and labor markets were tight from top to bottom. What's different today?