[wjossey]

I think it’s important throw an addendum onto that statement. “They will, and it is a good thing. Although there may be some short term downsides we should look to mitigate.”

I love to listen to economics podcasts and read economic articles and books in my spare time, so I’m sufficiently convinced that automation is a good thing for quality of life around the world. That being said, there is a real human cost as well that shouldn’t be downplayed. If we suddenly had autominous trucks available tomorrow, that would potentially lead to millions of American (tens of millions of world wide) workers that will become unemployed. Some percentage will pivot into new work. Some will struggle to find new jobs. Some will never find new employment. What we shouldn’t do is just discount that human suffering as “the cost of progress” and just move along. We short continue to work to find ways to help people with these transitions when and where we can.

In short, let’s always try to mix in some humanity with our disruptive innovations.

[_jal]

An important point, but I hope it is recognized that "we" don't do economic downside-mitigation, at least in the US. People said the same thing about NAFTA - they'd fix it in post. I think there were some half-hearted education efforts and a bit of other fluff, but nobody who could actually do anything really cared. You can see this pattern repeated over and over.

I only mean to pick on the US a little; we are worse than some other nations, but the problem is not unique to us. Humans just generally don't mitigate big, looming collective action problems. They ignore it until it happens and then whine that nobody did anything. Or, if it only effects the already-poor, everyone else settles on a narrative that it is their bad morals or laziness or whatever excuse doesn't make people think too hard.