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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Just because past industrial developments (Gutenberg, in your example) were ultimately net job creators doesn't mean it will work that way in the future. It might, but it doesn't have to. You haven't justified your assertion, even though you might be right.

"The biggest misunderstanding of this article is that the goal of business is not to "create jobs", it is to create wealth." The article doesn't say that. Business is certainly about creating wealth, but states and societies have legitimate public policy interests in ensuring that there are enough jobs (for some values of 'enough') to ensure that created wealth moves around, to give people something constructive to do, and ultimately to promote social stability.

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Past industrial developments are not just examples, they are models of how an economy can change and still continue to grow nonetheless. Your argument is just like saying "it's not because you throw a rock 10 times and it falls, that the 11th will not go on orbit instead". Fundamentally, there is nothing very different between the past technological revolutions and the current one. All of them brought sudden, massive improvements of productivity suddenly. All of them suddenly rendered a number of the previous workforce redundant. Did it result into mass poverty ? No. Never.

I'd like to see a clear argument why the internet, the mobile revolution and the ongoing automation going around us is going to kill more jobs than it creates.

I urge people to read Bastiat's "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen". You'll understand that the implications are never THAT simple not predictable. http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

---> about your second point: The article may not say that directly, but the ending shows that the writer is going to give us a big solution on "how to create jobs in the second economy" or something. It's just going to be his next big thing. He misses the point completely.

Unlike throwing similar rocks over and over, using historical examples as models has a pretty poor track record. Hence the saying that generals are always fighting the last war!

I do think they have some value, but I don't think the conclusions are necessarily obvious. We really only have two, very widely spaced, examples of mass changes in employment due to technology, the first being the advent of farming, and the second being the industrial revolution (the printing press may have put scribes out of work, but they were never a mass occupation). The industrial revolution had pretty wide-ranging social effects and did pretty much end a previous way of life: it put a lot of farmers and artisans out of work, which resulted in mass migrations to the cities, and employment in the new factories. It also produced new kinds of social challenges, like the tenement slums, urban riots, etc.

I think it's not entirely obvious what that tells us about what a mass transition from the factories will look like. Industrial technology both put one mass occupation out of work (agriculture/craft) and produced a new mass occupation to replace it (factory work). The main question people are asking, I suppose, is what is the new mass occupation that will replace factory work? It's also not clear what kinds of analogous demographic shifts or challenges it might produce.

I think you're one step behind. Many economies have already transitioned from factory work to clerical work (and customer service). The question now is what happens when those jobs are done better by machines.

"Did it result into mass poverty ? No. Never."

I live in the North West of England. Pretty much ground zero for the industrial revolution. There was horrific poverty as the "previous workforce" (agricultural workers) was made redundant and moved off the land into the cities. This extended well into the early twentieth century - you might want to check out the first part of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier for ordinary life in the late stages of an economic transition.

Those were different times: before organised state welfare and health provision, and with very different economic structures. But as others here have said, using the past as an historic or economic model for the future is going to lead to disappointment.

(I have spent a lot of my career writing software that automates skilled human processes, and links business processes across organisations. Exactly the kind of things described in the article. I think I'll do okay. But I've had a lot of time to think about this, and my personally not being on the loosing side is not comforting to me.)

Didn't the industrial revolution actually help with that pre-existing poverty?

Did it result into mass poverty ? No. Never.

For humans, not yet. It did, however, result in the wage of horses and oxen dropping below subsistence.

Why do you feel that technology cannot do to humans what it did to horses?

During the past industrial revolutions manual jobs were replaced by automation so workforce kept on moving to industries requiring basic brain power.This was the best fit as most people can function and use their brain at basic level.

This time it may be different as most of such jobs will be eliminated so only a very small percentage of people may remain employable.

To your last point, at the same time, the amount of power people have on their HANDS is now larger than ever. In the future, I imagine that you may not need to look for an employer, rather find a way to employ yourself with all the tools available to you.

This is true, but how many project management tools are we going to see? how many code-hosting companies out there? how many "collaboration tools" we're going to see?

Suddenly we're in this economy of people fighting for attention because everybody is doing the same thing. It's definitely getting harder to find ideas.

In addition to this how many people are creative,capable, and motivated enough to take on such creative projects.

And how many creative projects are viable business propositions?

Past industrial revolutions did result in some forms of mass poverty to some in society.

Horses is a class of worker that after the industrial revolution found itself without a job.

And many workers , after the industrial revolution found themselves working many hours a day(sometimes 16), for subsistence level,with little power, in unsafe workplaces and without any economical stability, and with no land/home they own.

As a response the union and labor movements came about, giving workers more bargaining power, labor laws and some sort of safety net.

Without all of those, many in society would have probably been much poorer.

From your link: "The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose labour suffers proportionably by the same cause. It is this third person who is always kept in the shade, and who, personating that which is not seen, is a necessary element of the problem. It is he who shows us how absurd it is to think we see a profit in an act of destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less absurd to see a profit in a restriction, which is, after all, nothing else than a partial destruction."

I note that the absurdity of profiting through restriction sounds a lot like today's implementation of copyright and patent laws, which can be seen as a partial destruction in its not-seen effect on the economy. Also, the section on Algeria seems applicable to most of the enormous spending done by the US abroad. I like reading works from more than a hundred years ago, especially when the authors seem to be speaking now.

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