My Dad said to me once that at school his tutors said that everyone should prepare for a future in which they wouldn't be working.
I believe there was even some classes on how people might possibly entertain themselves in the future since computers would be doing everyone's work for them.
Have we really seen this? I think not. What happened was the computers just enabled people to do their jobs faster and those whose jobs were genuinely removed by technology have simply found work elsewhere.
Perhaps we are at a point where efficiency (read computers) are seriously putting people out of work. But the reality is labour forces are actually flexible and over time they adapt. New jobs will and are being created and as long as our labour forces remain educated enough and can harness technology to their advantage there will no problems.
It's those who are incapable or unwilling to adapt to the new world we live in that will fall by the wayside.
I'm not seeing the new jobs. US unemployment has spiked from 5% to 9% officially (it's probably a lot higher, since we stop counting "discouraged workers") and new industries haven't popped up which could use twelve million freshly retrained workers. A lot of people had terrible jobs which don't really require human-level intelligence, and now our economy is punishing them for having only surplus unskilled labor for which there isn't enough demand. I have no idea what I'd be doing if I weren't obsessed with software, which has a no doubt temporary labor shortage on account of being almost impossible to do competently with today's tools.
Shifts on the job side take time. This isn't the first time that technology has removed jobs, but what is novel about this time around is the speed at which those jobs were removed. Instead of it taking a generation for a technology shift to happen, it takes years. That speed is what displaces many people, especially those that have not grown up in the information age.
Thank you: I'm very surprised by the HN group mind on this topic. Sure this is a community of technology entrepreneurs who generally do not have trouble finding new and innovative ways of surviving in the modern world's job market. But how naive it is for this community to project its experience onto the masses.
It's also a good reminder that these minimal intelligence jobs that most are falling back on will A) be automated next, and B) should not be considered as good for our society as more challenging jobs before. They lead to an overall brain rot in society.
Sure if we all have more free time to pursue what we wish, that's great. But what no one wants to discuss is how that new society will function vis a vis wealth circulation, assuming wealth continues to be the key to survival.
I believe there was even some classes on how people might possibly entertain themselves in the future since computers would be doing everyone's work for them.
Have we really seen this? I think not. What happened was the computers just enabled people to do their jobs faster and those whose jobs were genuinely removed by technology have simply found work elsewhere.
Perhaps we are at a point where efficiency (read computers) are seriously putting people out of work. But the reality is labour forces are actually flexible and over time they adapt. New jobs will and are being created and as long as our labour forces remain educated enough and can harness technology to their advantage there will no problems.
It's those who are incapable or unwilling to adapt to the new world we live in that will fall by the wayside.