[opo]

I see this analogy quite often, but I think it isn't very useful. Horses didn't have agency - horses weren't able to apply for other work, couldn't retrain themselves, weren't able to move to somewhere where they might be employed, etc. Saying workers are like horses and are helpless to do anything to help themselves isn't accurate.

This isn't to say that all (or even most) workers will be able to adapt to losing their job to automation or what can/should be done to help them.

[danans]

> Saying workers are like horses and are helpless to do anything to help themselves isn't accurate.

Not all workers, but for many workers, this is the case. Very few coal miners have been able to retrain as software developers, despite earnest efforts on the part of some organizations in coal country.

They could try to get manual labor work in another industry, but industries to which their skills are readily transferable - like manufacturing and construction - are also automating many of the most menial of jobs. A modern factory employs far fewer workers per unit of output than those of even the recent past.

Skilling-up to the point where you have value to the new economy isn't as straightforward for many workers as it seems like it should be to many of us already in the new economy.

I'm not suggesting that they are like horses in that they will be sent to the glue factory, but lots of people in that sort of position have seen their quality of life - and that of their communities - suffer a great deal over the decades of deindustrialization.

[valuearb]

Yet median incomes continue to rise, despite the swath automation takes to “skilled” jobs every generation.

The personal computer annilated lots of “premium” calculator jobs in accounting. Yet somehow it’s created far better jobs to replace them.

It’s easy to see which jobs would go away because of automation. Yet No one has ever been able to predict the better new jobs that arise with any level of accuracy. Yet that has always happened. Why should that change now?