[mikx]

Creative destruction is a sign of great progress. There was a time when America was almost all factory workers and a time before that when America was mostly farmers.

While it is scary to be in the middle of a shifting trend in with a massive decline of old jobs, there will be a future that will take us completely by surprise. It will be unimaginable.

If you told someone from the industrial revolution that one day that people would pretend to be real people and then displayed in tiny little boxes and become the wealthy and elite of the world, they would think you were insane. The same would hold true if you told them that one day we would be able to all send our kids to schools and that they would start working in their mid 20's because their parents and the government could support and fund their development.

[IsaacL]

I partially agree with you. You're definitely right about the industrial revolution, and I hope you're right about the information revolution.

However, I think there's a real possibility that, in the near future, automation will lead to a permanent increase in unemployment. Even if general AI proves to be a long way away (which I think it is), a lot of service jobs are algorithmic enough that they could became automated in the next few decades. If true, you end up with a small elite business/management class which finds themselves far wealthier than before; a few people who managed to hold onto their old jobs (domestic cleaners, plumbers, etc) or find new 'creative' jobs; and a vast unemployed underclass.

In theory with all our new machine-created wealth the entire underclass could live very comfortably on welfare. However, the way most societies are set up, that's unlikely to happen. The economic pie gets bigger but the people at the top suddenly find themselves with even more power and get an even bigger slice, and the people at the bottom get screwed.

I think this guy makes a fairly convincing argument: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

If you have the time, his scifi novella about the social impacts of mass job loss due to automation is also OK (like a lot of amateur scifi, some of the writing and characterisation is pretty bad, but the ideas are interesting). Worth a read if you have the time. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Season 2 of the Wire also touches on similar themes. (It's obviously not sci-fi, but it made me rethink my belief that "automation is fine, people just need to not be so picky about finding new jobs").

[yummyfajitas]

The economic pie gets bigger but the people at the top suddenly find themselves with even more power and get an even bigger slice, and the people at the bottom get screwed.

So far, the exact opposite of this has occurred. The economic pie has gotten vastly bigger, inequality has increased significantly, and welfare has done nothing but grow.

[nikhilgk]

Industrial revolution lead to the popularization of democracy and the emergence of socialism and communism which are all ultimately means for adapting society and economy to the revolutionary changes. Information revolution will have to bring similar societal and economic changes before all the short term negative impact dissipates and its benefits becomes more universally available. However the main difference here is the timespan afforded by the new revolution. Society had time in the order of generations to catch up to Industrial revolution; Information revolution reduces this by an order of magnitude.

I have read Manna (http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) and strongly recommend it in the context of this post.

[mikx]

I sometimes worry too about a substitute good for humans, but I believe that many entrepreneurs will exploit the abundance of unemployment to fuel their visions.

This reoccurring pattern of a labor market becoming liquid and transitioning has happened before. Hong Kong skyrocketed in unemployment when trade opened in China and most "algorithmic" jobs migrated across the border literally overnight. Education became a central part of the economy and the country moved forward.

[dooq]

The novel Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut explores this theme in an interesting manner.

[varjag]

If you are completely honest about it, you'd have to admit there are million upon million people who are simply unable to be information workers. And as technology increases in sophistication, information workforce will be shrinking as well.

One popular idea of dealing with this uncomfortable idea is Singularity, where all those now-useless people will vanish from eyes in a giant brain-hug. So unsurprisingly this 1-2-3-?-profit kind of recipe became popular with techno-futurists. But IMO a Great Unrest or a new Great War due to social tensions, followed by surviving clique of humanity drowning in machine-supported hedonism is more realistic.

[Stormbringer]

The average plumber, electrician or carpenter (after their relatively short but brutal apprenticeships) easily make more money than 9 out of 10 programmers I know.

Which was why I was surprised to see a recent article about how IT was near the top of the best paying jobs list. I think though that list must have only been taking into account salaried employees.

To be fair though as a programmer, unlike say a carpenter, if one of the logs overflows the risk of being crushed to death by it is considerably less.

[kiba]

Let hope history continues to repeat itself again and again when it comes to creating new jobs to replace the old.

[tomjen3]

I can't imagine it won't, at least the next couple times.

But each time, it seems, takes less and less time (we were farmers for thousands of years, hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years but the industrial revolution is only a couple hundred years old).

And when we can no longer use humans? I don't know, but it seems that the only way we can ever end up in that situation is if we have achieved general ai, which is to say that we will be at the cusp of the singularity.

The industrial revolution may have made the work horse obsolete, but it had only one use. Humans have many.

[loewenskind]

If we ever get to the point that jobs aren't replaced that would mean that all work isn't needed so the typical rules of capitalism no longer apply.

Capitalism is just a mechanism for allocating resources, it's not any kind of moral judgment on anything.

[gaius]

It's more subtle than that; capitalism is to economics as thermodynamics is to physics. It doesn't matter what "system" you adopt, no economy can sustainably expend more wealth than it creates, just as there can be no perpetual motion machine. Capitalists are people who recognize this basic truth and act accordingly, equivalent to engineers who use the laws of physics to create machines. But what do we call people who claim to have invented perpetual motion...?