How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
I think he's saying something approximately like: there are likely jobs we can't think of yet that will pop up. They always have.
Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
To a certain extent that is true. But it matters where those jobs are eliminated. Usually the jobs that replace lower jobs or offset the automation are higher level. Do we actually believe that everyone in society is able to work the higher level jobs? I would think the jobs would need to align to the population's potential.
To a certain extent, high level jobs of today are low level jobs of tomorrow. Imagine what one can do today with just a mobile phone, compared to what could be done 50 years ago.
Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.
> That's actually eliminated/reduced the needs for translators
This is a radically misinformed statement. These are the real-world experience I've had with translators:
- translator with degree in languages, occasional translator: never mentioned Google Translate
- semi-professional translator (significant source of income coming from it): said that most professionals nowadays use GT as first pass; never mentioned GT being a threat
- multiple gigs I've requested for official documentation: those can't be done via GT, as they require a certified translator
- realtime translation I needed: again, can't be done via GT, as a certified translator is required
The idea that GT is eliminating translators is nonsense. It actually augments their capacity (re-read above, this is a real-world opinion of a translator).
> The jobs replacing it are much fewer and higher skilled (software dev).
Even assuming the (wrong) argument that GT eliminates jobs, SW devs are just one of the options. This actually reflects the ancestor comment: "Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination". Computer translation surely helped businesses around the world in communicating on a global scale, in a way that previously was not resource-effective (e.g. lookup on the dictionary); while this can't be quantified, it's the opposite of "reducing jobs".
Automation started around 300 years ago, not 30. If the automation-pessimists were right, essentially no jobs would exist by now. See lump of labour fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour.
Yep, totally agree with what you are saying. It is fundamentally uncertain. I do believe there are more jobs than we realize which aren't capable of being automated - things where there is a lot of diversity in the tasks required to do the job. Consider a real estate broker - no single task is rocket science, but there are perhaps 100 individual things a broker needs to be able to do. It's not going to be automated away. These 'highly diverse task' jobs are very common.
you could totally automate a real estate broker... a drone or android could easily show you a place, and maybe there's another person at a call-center who's showing 15 homes/hour, but that displaces 20 brokers/agents....
Or you could just realize that real estate is a broken industry and why does there even need to be a broker at all... List your home yourself, have software that does the rest...
I mean, lawyers, doctors, software programming, can easily be placed in the next 20 years. All fast-food, grocery, freight(depending on self-driving cars, or perhaps better train systems that have direct to store delivery)..
I look forward to the day when only 5% of the population is employable, because we'll have to figure out someway to live post-scarcity or just let people starve, but if 5% work, 5% then are consumers too...and that leaves out a lot of power, control, and economic potentiality.
Have you gone through the entire process and bought a house? It's complicated. There is a lot more to it than showing houses. If it were anything like as easy as you suggest, it would be done already - it's a giant market with money sloshing around.
I don't buy that doctors, lawyers, software engineers or real estate brokers will be automated away in 20 years. As a society there has been 15 solid years put into automating driving a car - a skill so simple we allow 16 year olds with no formal training and half of who have an iq less than 100 to do it. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers and real estate brokers have jobs which are very complex compared to driving a car.
Most real estate is not complicated. It looks complicated to people who haven't done it. In most states there's a standard form and the process is simple. If things get complicated, then you need a real estate attorney.
Fair enough, maybe that's why it seems simple? You do enough of them it starts seeming easy? To me it seemed like there was a lot of moving parts throughout the process.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.