[goatinaboat]

That's called the Lump of Labour Fallacy.

What's the fallacy called of thinking everyone in the world can just retrain as a webdev?

The jobs of food preparation and delivery still need to exist, but we don't need to grind them into the ground, that's a free choice to do so made by VC-backed startups.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Food preparation and delivery were not exactly stable jobs before Doordash came around. I’d guess that driving for Doordash is a substantially better experience than driving for the median Dominos, although I don’t know of anyone who’s tried to collect data on the subject.

[eru]

Who says they need to retrain as a webdev?

I have no clue what the jobs of the future will be. Just as people in the past scarcely had a clue about the jobs of our present.

[TeMPOraL]

But the important point is, retraining takes time, and kicks you down to the bottom of the career ladder.

Which means automating people away pushes some of these people into poverty, and the only hope they have is that their children will start a profitable career in a sector that doesn't get eaten by software in the next few decades.

That's not to say I'm against automation and improvement. Just that not much thought is being given to individuals who find themselves automated away. That there will likely be a job for them is not much of a consolation prize over no job at all; hell, in civilized countries with developed social security, a job may be a worse option than no job at all.

[eru]

In the long run, the average member of society can consume exactly as much as the average member of society produces.

Productivity is what got us out of poverty of the pre-industrial-revolution era. And productivity is still key in the long run.

[andrewjl]

Averages can conceal just as much as they reveal. What does a society look like with those same averages but where the distribution of production is governed by power laws and the distribution of consumption isn't?

[eru]

In the end, for people's welfare it matters what they can consume over their lifetimes.

So flat distribution of consumption seem like an egalitarian utopia?

[andrewjl]

A flat distribution doesn't comport well with heterogenous consumption preferences. The latter is a trend that will likely intensify in the coming decade.

The challenge with discussing welfare is that different people have radically differing definitions of what it entails. A solution that's worked ok so far is to seek a minimal band of commonality. In the future, given current trends, it might be difficult to maintain even that and it will likely "snap" into several fragments. The strains leading to this "snapping" are the root causes of most headline political dynamics worldwide.

[goatinaboat]

That there will likely be a job for them is not much of a consolation prize over no job at all

But they already have jobs. Working in the restaurant or catering or hospitality or whatever industry is a job, and one it's possible (or it was) to earn a reasonable living in without a slew of academic qualifications.

Then one day, billionaires who can't think of anything better to do show up and say, we're going to insert ourselves into the relationships you had with your customers and your profits are now our profits and you can survive a little while longer by working harder for less, but you will go under eventually and everything you had will be ours. Because what we had was not enough, we need to have it all.