Seems unlikely. We've been eliminating jobs with labor-saving devices for centuries. In the past they've always created as many jobs as they destroyed. What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?
We are not talking about a 'point' where the 40 hour week stops. It is a gradual decline in the amount of human labor, which has been going on for centuries. Automation means just that.
Thinking that work can forever shift towards other areas is stated on the assumptions that: 1. Not everything can be automated. 2. Human need will always grow to accommodate supply.
Now more than ever, you should question nr. 1. And in the areas that prove difficult to automate (e.g. education, law, healthcare, design..) there really is only so much work. (Except for law, maybe.)
Regarding the second assumption, when I look at highly educated people (which in my eyes, represent what in the future modal educated people will be like), they recognize desire as something that should be limited. They know that more money does not make you happier. Some even find a lot of joy in living simple and frugal.
It's been doing a good job so far. If there's enough of something, we tend to multiply until there isn't. You also seem to take it as given that "supply" is constrained by available human labor (and the efficiency of its application) and not by the power output of the Planet Earth. (You may, of course, be correct. I have absolutely no idea how one would even go about refining such an assertion enough to test it).
This seems dubious. The avg. work week has been decreasing for a long time. It was only a century ago that significant amounts of <10 year olds were working, and the average work week was twice as long. Now it's slipping towards 30 hours a week.
This seems to just to continue that trend. It's becoming less likely that <20 year olds will have ever held a job.
I can't see it getting any better as boomers get older and refuse to give up their jobs.
For very low skilled jobs, automation can do the job better than a poor quality worker, because it is predictable and consistent. For jobs that still can't be automated, many of them can be done remotely, and are now done in lower labor cost countries by ambitious, conscientious workers. Jobs that can't be done remotely are being filled by illegal immigrants who are also ambitious, conscientious workers.
If you are at the bottom of the American labor heap, you have never faced competition from machines, globalization, and immigration like you have now. The problem is not just that the alternatives to low-end domestic labor are cheaper, but that they are higher quality, and therefore push the price of low quality domestic labor to near zero.
In the long-term, as machines become able to do more jobs better than humans, people will simply not be willing to pay any price for an error-prone human to do a worse job than a cheap machine. Then, low skilled humans will only be employed in jobs that can only be performed by humans, such as prostitution.
This shows a lot of ignorance of the economics and sociology of poverty in America and elsewhere, including poor educational opportunities that are not created by laziness or stupidity by the students. The statement detracts from your other well-made points.
Actually I think they would. Being an employer of a human would be a sign of prestige for the wealthy.
Just imagine you're at a future cocktail party and your host unveils his pretty human waitresses. He's obviously wealthy to afford a real human instead of using robots like everyone else
It is difficult to overstate the increase in opportunity over the last hundred years for women in particular. Back then, there were so very few avenues to the middle class for even an extraordinary single woman. Today, Mary Poppins would probably go to a fine college and be able to land a job as a pharmaceutical sales representative at the very least.
The point is, for a large class of servants, you need both immense wealth disparity and a large class of insanely rich people. We've increased a) and in the process, b) has gotten smaller.
Don't get me wrong, many people are rich - but only a few are rich enough that they can afford servants. This might change if the job situation gets worse, increasing the disparity so that more rich people now qualify as insanely rich.
The US discriminates against poor people. The fully-loaded cost of a US citizen is too high because the do-gooders require all sorts of expensive benefits and mandates. If a farmer pays a US citizen $12/hour to pick tomatoes, he also pays another $8/hr for code-compliant housing, workers compensation and unemployment insurance.
But, simultaneously, the government turns a blind eye if you ship in some Mexicans or Latin Americans and treat them like slaves.
Collectively, we share this psychosis where society wants to provide all of these great benefits and human rights for citizens, while treating this other class of person as something less than human.
If you are at the bottom of the American labor heap, you
have never faced competition from machines, globalization,
and immigration like you have now.
I strongly question the assertion that we are currently losing lowskilled jobs to automation or competition at a faster pace than in the past.
Also, I'd argue the biggest leap is computer technology, and it's having a lot of impact still. My guess is bio-engineering is next. If that happens (and it's a big if, in my book), there will be even more impact.
So, going back to the point, my original assertion was we're slowly running out of low-skills jobs. That's backed up by pretty much any look at employment figures. Manual labor has been wiped out to an insane extent (agriculture is what, 3% of the labor force now?). And the service industry is next, IMHO. Retail is slowly bleeding to death, for example.
Perhaps we're butting up against limits on the amount of energy per unit time available to the economy in a way that we haven't in the past couple centuries?
The problem is that the amount of value that could hypothetically be created isn't the limiting factor. Rather, there are at least a dozen different structural forces that are all aligning to prevent people who want to work from connecting with companies that want to create jobs. And while these problems could theoretically be removed with the stroke of a pen, they probably won't be for another few decades, at least in the U.S.
E.g. if you look at the literacy levels in America, it should be pretty obvious why this is an issue: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
If it's happening at all, it's bound to happen at some point. We're just the people who live at that point in time. So what you're asking is, "what are the odds we're living now". Since we're (presumably ;) alive, they're 100%.