Hacker News Reader

That's a flagrantly false analogy. But see above--it's not time for humans to be outmoded quite yet. And when it is, it won't just be low-skill jobs that disappear.

View on HN

Why not? Jobs don't require uniform levels of creativity, and we aren't waiting for a singularity before we start. We already have GPS-guided tractors replacing farmhands and self-checkout registers starting to replace retail clerks, while white-collar fields like engineering and software have merely shed some rote work (drafting and data entry) and medicine and law have changed even less.

I think the jobs most likely to disappear are terrible wastes of human minds; I just wish we weren't so vicious towards people we can't find a need for right now.

This was already answered in my big comment. There is no trend towards any unemployment at all; there never has been any unemployment associated with tech growth; tech growth is smoother and more iterative than people are conceptualizing, so it's not like there's any technical reason that this would change; and the current tech is no revolutionary exception to the trends of tech growth we've had in the past. Basically, you assume that a certain level of tech growth implies that people who can't keep up with it will be out of a job, but we empirically observe that there is no reason to suspect this. The sorts of events that could break these patterns are singularities, not mobile apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com