I hear this a lot, that “automation creates jobs” chestnut.
Whenever people try to support this argument, they either fall into the “not thinking quantitatively” fallacy by pointing out that “sure, 25 writers got laid off, but the company used to have no programmers, and now they have 2!” Or they fall into the “not explaining the mechanism” fallacy by giving examples from the past where “stablehands retrained as mechanics” without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind.
> without examining why that happened, and what aspects make 20th century mechanization and 21st century automation completely different in kind.
So, what aspects are completely different in your opinion? I don't see any fundamental differences. People's wants are unlimited, so the workers no longer necessary due to automation can move to fields where automation can't be applied. There will always be plenty of those because, again, unlimited wants. I mean, in Japan, people are already paying for artificial friends, who will go out for dinner with them. I think we'll have much more work in human contact and companionship in the future. Hopefully, much more doctors per patients and much more teachers per student than today. Etc.
Part of the reason I think 21st century automation is different from 20th century mechanization is that when you mechanize jobs, that requires physical machines, and the number of factory workers and mechanics needed to build/maintain those machines scales linear-ish-ly with the number of machines needed. And so mechanized farming got rid of a lot of farming jobs, but also allowed more farms to be built, which required more and more machines, and thus created manufacturing/mechanic jobs.
Software jobs don’t scale like manufacturing jobs. If you automate a particular profession’s work, they’ll lose their jobs, but meanwhile maybe now 10x more customers can afford the service they provide. But now, scaling the automating software to serve 10x the customers won’t require 10x as many programmers, maybe just a couple good devops people to tend the flock.
You might then argue that customers will still find things to want from the newly freed up labor, but I also think we’re going to start being hard-pressed for categories of work where “the human touch” makes a difference, and also where there is room to employ large sectors of the workforce. Add in that customers “new demands” won’t necessarily correlate with the need for human workers, and it becomes easier to see a world where people keep coming up with new wants, and automation keeps swooping in and immediately satisfying the demand.
How many people work on farms as a percentage of the population now as they did 100 years ago? We still eat, but now almost no one farms. Most everyone is still employed. We’ll figure something out.
Ok but that's exactly the problem, the situation we've "figured out" is kinda trash. A bunch of rich people own all the farms and we gave everyone bullshit admin jobs because we can't admit to ourselves that almost nobody farms and we still all eat and maybe that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.
What? I'm not comparing the two. The point is that we don't need to do the admin jobs, and we need fewer people to farm the same amount of food, so we can just split the extra free time and maybe some people don't even need to have a job.
> that means a good portion of the population could just chill out.
so you're asking those people who farm (using huge machines and automation to do so extremely efficiently) to give you free food? Why would they want to do that?
The people producing the food get paid.
A third party might pay for the feeding of those who cannot pay.
Or money accumulated might get redistributed to enable everyone to afford it.
This doesn't always happen mind you. But it shows that your (and my) economic instincts are piss poor. We can't just assume what the future holds.
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Another few examples:
3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.
Automatic Drum machines didn't kill drummers either, but allowed for more music to be made in general.
The only thing that automation "killed" recently was Lawyers, as online webpages that auto-generated common forms removed a ton of jobs that Lawyers used to do. IIRC, Lawyers are in somewhat of a decline because of this.
So it just goes to show that no one really can predict these things.
> 3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.
together with the previous comment on mechanics and stablehands, i wonder how many people in history grew up training and wanting to be a mechanic, only to be told, sorry we just don't have that many automobiles in the world, we need more stablehands. i wonder how many people went to do fine art in school only to be told 'look you have good skills and all but we just need more tweening artists'.
