I don't need evidence to the contrary, what I said is the null hypothesis. If there's proof that every job lost to automation will necessarily mean one additional job opening in a different field, you are welcome to provide it. In absence of such evidence, I'm going to stick with the default belief: a job lost means a job lost, period.

And what is stopping that small business from starting up right now? Considering how terribly Amazon treats their workers, people should be lining up around the block to apply.

Dollars to donuts, the answer is the small business can't afford to start up because Amazon uses its monopolistic power to crush it, and that power will only grow as they continue to automate.

In many of those past cases, the new way to do something involved new machines, which required new or expanded manufacturing to build, new or expanded supply chains to provide the materials to make the new machine, and created new jobs to operate and maintain the new machines.

Much of the new present day automation does not involve new machines. It often instead involves just interfacing a computer to an existing machine and writing software to let that computer replace the human operator of the machine. Those computers and interfaces are commodity items, largely built in automated factories.

This seems to me to be a fundamental difference.

It doesn't "keep happening", it's happened exactly twice, in the two industrial revolutions, in each case the new type of work that needed millions of human hands was obvious. There is no guarantee that it will happen again, especially given that new industrial inventions require no human intervention at all.

To fall back on an example that is not my own, imagine a conversation in 1900 between two horses:

Horse 1: I'm worried about these new automobile things, they might take our jobs

Horse 2: Don't worry, every technological development that displaced horse work in the past has led to more newer and better jobs for horses, there will always be work for us. Just look at trains, we don't have to pull big loads anymore, now we just draw carts and support riders, who knows what great jobs are just around the corner.

The world's horse population peaked in 1915, and is now down by 70% in the US.

Look at how retail has changed in the past 30 years. I usually point out video rental stores as an example of technological disruption. Rental stores and stores that offered rentals as part of their mix made up something like 45,000 locations, and maybe about 125k jobs. They were replaced by maybe 20k jobs or less, with redbox and netflix combined only accounting for 8kish jobs.

Retail changed from a career that offered full time jobs to one making use of a just in time workforce, and has suffered tremendous consolidation over that period.Like entre chains and concept stores have declined; something like Media Play is dead and no longer able to be revived. Even Gamestop suffers, as the amount of physical releases declines.

I think retail shows it can be pretty dire indeed.

>Yes, now those workers won't have such horrible conditions.

Instead of working in "horrible" conditions, these workers are now simply unemployed. Do you think they see that as an improvement of their position in life?