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by simonsarris 784 days ago
> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?

There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.