Comment by snrplfth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snrplfth | Hacker News Reader

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Generally we don't, and really can't, know ahead of time which new work will be invented and done in the future. That is the point of entrepreneurialism, and of a market more broadly. What I'm pointing out is that it has consistently been the case that people have declared that, because they could not imagine what new kinds of work would exist in the future, that therefore automation would throw people into permanent unemployment. This has consistently been mistaken.

Much work could be automated - but automation is not free. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of work being automated away - but is it worth the cost? In what locations? For what applications? All the time or just some of the time?

The most common way of adjusting to automation is not just to add new value to an old "job title", but to move into new fields entirely. A farmer today has very different responsibilities to a farmer a hundred years ago - but there's also far, far fewer people farming at all. Most people who do things that have been automated will do things that simply weren't done before, or were done very little.

Consider also that in the past, many of the jobs shifts took place on a generational scale. A farmer--instead of having 10 children that were farmers or farmers' wives, and one that was a non-farmer--would have one child (or less) that became a farmer, and the rest would become non-farmers.

The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.

After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?

It's not necessarily always easy or painless. I certainly didn't claim it was. But you can't really grow the economy without introducing labour-saving devices that change the composition of jobs. Economies didn't have 90% of people working on the farm because they preferred it to anything else; it was that way because it had to be - the productivity of labour was so low. Likewise, if we want the economy to continue to grow at reasonable rates, it must be understood that job change is part of that.

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