[dougabug]

As automation continues to improve, we see that fewer and fewer people are sufficiently skilled that they cannot be replaced at least in part by technology. Even tasks demanding high cognitive abilities gradually shift into the domain of what advanced machines can do. I wonder what kind of leverage average software engineers will have when machines can write better code than an average programmer? Or allow one developer to do the work currently requiring a hundred.

And how can there be a labor scarcity when productivity has risen to levels where we can overproduce almost everything we can think of, far outstripping our natural resources?

[chipsy]

A lot of our inability to automate comes down to not being able to operate at a big enough scope. For example, all commuter transportation problems are ultimately caused by having too many people, too distant from one another. But we can't simply move them closer together for a variety of reasons, and so we have to think about trip planning instead. But we could also reduce the need to make trips and reduce the average length of each trip.

The future is going to be full of complicated thoughts like this - problems to which automation can solve some things but policy and design solves others. We'll have to be really good philosophers to avoid catastrophic error.