But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this observation.
I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.
The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.
There is a thing to say about "unnatural-ness". Handling horses up to a point had to be more intuitive and more approachable, we've been around horses and other mammals since forever. Around spreadsheets? 40 years, max.
They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can make 100 napkins at the same time.
Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
As a software developer, I've personally eliminated many jobs. Software was eliminated entire classes of jobs. Almost all investment in technology by businesses is about cost reduction and the number one cost is labour.
I think we're past the point where technology is making new jobs -- all that low hanging fruit has been gone for decades now. Growth now is all about optimization.
That's undeniably true, but not the point: obviously new technology eliminates entire classes of jobs (not much call for telephone switchboard operators these days), but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost, we're fine.
I personally do wonder, though, if many of the new jobs that are created are worse jobs. For example, I have not yet taken any work in the "gig economy", but most of it seems pretty miserable, with shit wages.
> but ultimately if more jobs are created than are lost
For people who believe more jobs are created, it seems like they rely in chaos theory or something. They can't see how or where these new jobs will be created or how automation leads to it. We automated physical labour so we increased intellectual labour. Now are automating intellectual labour too so what's being increased now?
amount of people who can do stuff that is considered "intellectual"?
It is not different from happened with guns - with introduction of guns, military has grown bigger not smaller - in comparison to knight era.
Now you will have more people who will be able to produce art, write music, songs, develop games, write stories and so on. People will be able to produce scenes without months or years of learning how to use photoshop, after effects and co. We now have more painters than in da vinci era and we have more musicians than in bach era.
Same with software engineering - ability to do stuff easier will produce more people doing that. Not less. We do not code to the metal much anymore - most of the software engineers do not use assembly anymore and higher level languages simplified stuff that required hard learning in the past - yet the amount of developers is more than ever.
Software development is a bit of an exception because we have, probably by a whole order of magnitude, too few developers for the world.
However, what about all other things that are intellectual? Accountants, word processors, assistants, etc? We need fewer of those people than ever before.
As for the effect on art, the greater the unskilled people who can produce art the less it's worth. AI will eventually drive the value of art to zero. Even now 99.99999% of skilled musicians are unable to make a living doing it.
You do realize that most governments run massive jobs programs to ensure this number of available jobs stays high, right? In the US we give massive tax breaks in exchange for hiring numbers.
Computers may have very well reduced job numbers but we're running a contrived system at this point.