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Comment by ranci | Hacker News Reader

Why in gods name would anybody pursue any of this if it resulted in the same amount of jobs, except the new jobs cost a company more money than the old ones? That is completely and utterly delusional.

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The same reason why automating farming led to the creation of jobs: we never run out of things to do if we never run out of things to want.

That's not what it's saying. It's saying that, as usual, productivity gains lead to new wealth, which produces new jobs as a result. E.g., the automation that allowed us to mechanize agriculture allowed laborers to move into other industries that were also being automated, where they could be more productive.

And we should assume that there is an infinite number of industries for humans to constantly move onto why? It's not like there is a law of the universe that says there must always be more industries for humans to move once another industry became obsolete. Some may successfully move into other industries. Others will just develop a drug habit or commit suicide. Fun facts: once the internet started becoming pervasive in the very early 2000s, the labor participation rate went down soon after, and suicides went up at about the same time. Both trends have held since.

>And we should assume that there is an infinite number of industries for humans to constantly move onto why?

Because humans have an infinite amount of wants/desires they'd be willing to pay for if they could afford to hire someone to do it. Practical example in Australia: aged care. The baby boomers, the richest generation, is rapidly aging, so one of the biggest growth industries is aged care/nursing.

Aged care will be a growth industry for another 20 years or so and then it will decrease rapidly.

The same thing happened with the tennis industry 30 years ago -- Boomers loved tennis until they aged out of it.

These are two separate problems. One is the increase in productivity; the second is the application of that productivity to creating new wealth and industry. You are worried about the second not happening; this is a result of capital concentration and income inequality, which stymies investment going where it is needed. But we can't seriously pretend we are running out of useful work for people to do. A half a moment's thought should convince us otherwise. We just need to be able to allocate capital to that work.

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