[yorwba]

> Here's a thought experiment: What would happen if, by the end of 2019, true, 100% self-driving cars became a reality. I know this is not going to happen, but it no longer seems a far-fetched fantasy. In the US, driving is the number one job for the majority of states. What are all of these people supposed to do, become self-driving car programmers?

In the "let them eat cake" scenario, those people will have plenty of free time to stage a revolution and take their piece of the cake by force. Below the threshold of civil war, you get a Wild West where armed bandits hold up trains of self-driving trucks and loot them, creating a thriving job market for security guards protecting the trucks.

Of course both of those scenarios are highly undesirable, so it's more likely that some kind of tax will be introduced to take automating jobs from extremely profitable to barely profitable, with the proceeds used to pay for unemployment benefits and retraining for the displaced workers. (With the amount of retraining depending on how many other jobs haven't been automated yet.)

That said, some people are going to see their standard of living decrease without any way to escape. Such people have existed since forever, and they usually end up homeless if not dead. Automation doesn't create any new problems in that regard, it just makes them large enough that they can no longer be ignored easily.

[ultrasounder]

If i were to play the devil's advocate, these "Skilled" jobs have always been on the line. Look at what Uber and Lyft have done to F.T. cab drivers in all major U.S. cities. I have been using Scoop(Bay area wide Corporate Car share app). Its only a matter of time FAANG dumps their "Google bus" in favor of their employees scooping to work by incentivizing and subsidizing it. So there goes the cushy "Google bus" driver job. Not by automation but by a variation of mass transit. In such cases, the employers have to pick up the tab by offering those "skilled" workers displaced OJT/retraining and funneling them into more "non-skilled", knowledge-based jobs. It is not going to be easy and Corporate America finally has to acknowledge its Corporate responsibility. If not Mayhem will ensue and everyone stands to lose.