[daveguy]

Hm. The subtitle is "Destruction of large numbers of jobs unlikely, says new OECD Study", but the very first table gives a list of percent of jobs automatable by country. It ranges from 7-12%. That is a HELL of a lot of jobs. The argument is, "have no fear! it won't be 47% of jobs automated!" -- only 10%. 10% job loss is a labor crisis. Of course if you have all of those retrainable as other jobs (including automation supervisor) then maybe it won't be too bad, but that seems pretty unlikely and this article doesn't exactly quell concerns.

[rhino369]

Something like 70% of Americans worked in agriculture in 1850, and like 5% did in 1950 (many of whom were probably migrant workers from Mexico).

We've gone through radical change before.

[pasquinelli]

how it goes down is important though. if automation follows after labor begins to move to something else then that's one thing, but the reverse, automation putting people out of work, mean there might not be anything for them to realistically move to.

[zaroth]

A booming business in automation and robot repair.

[superuser2]

The whole point is that you need fewer humans in the loop. If every factory worker automated out of a job was hired back to work on the robots, we'd skip the automation part entirely.

[adrianN]

Good luck learning to program or repair self-driving trucks when you've been a truck driver for your whole career.

[Freebo]

Self-driving trucks have mechanical parts too. Even if you automate basic mechanical maintenance, operation and supervision will still require human intervention for a relatively long time.

[pixl97]

One of the bigger issues now is you're competing with the entire world. When global shipping can get any product almost anywhere in a few days, economy of scale wins.

[bad_user]

With oil becoming more expensive, for how long do you think global shipping will stay cheap? "Economy of scale" is many times an euphemism for "burn fossil fuels with subsidized costs".

[kardos]

We can go back to using sails. Cheaper but slower, so it'll work for a portion of shipping

[Qantourisc]

Yes, and they where replaced with mainly useful jobs. But how many useful jobs can keep coming up with ? At what point does it just become sick extravagance of goods(materialism) and services we do not need?

[IndianAstronaut]

Not as many jobs as were destroyed by the tractor. The tractor replaced over 70% of jobs, which was the proportion of farmers before the tractor.