| An example: Retail investors largely didn't exist. Digital retail trading platforms greatly expanded the pool of retail traders, which actually increases the demand for brokers (as in, people trained for the purpose of facilitating financial transactions). Nobody using Robinhood would have hired a broker. Now, thousands of such people work servicing their accounts. I have no love to for finance industry, much less fintech; i would accept practically any argument that the finance sector as a whole, or retail trading as an idea, is a bad thing for working class people. But i don't see how creating a whole new market for people that didn't previously exist, and which increases overall demand for the specific specialized labor in question, has removed jobs from the pool in aggregate. I don't think this applies for example with "well former shop clerks are now Amazon delivery drivers" -- that may well be true (or less than true) but still materially worse for everyone involved, etc. I just don't accept, as axiom, that every every single technology has had an exclusively negative effect on overall employment prospects. For clarity, I'm very much a socialist, i have no issue with the idea fundamentally that technology in the hands of capitalists is detrimental to the working class writ large in basically all cases. I just take umbrage with the assumption that it's impossible to work in tech without facilitating such things. Much of my work, I'm happy to say, has been about helping people do their jobs better; it hasn't been directed at making them do more in less time, reduce headcount, or some abstract efficiency. It's been to help people do the jobs they already have to do, more effectively. A job a person still has to do, but can be done less stressfully with help from technology. I wish every thing I've ever touched was such, admittedly it isn't. But i think there's lots of places where that might still be true: aircraft engineers? Pilots? (Fewer trains i guess but that's mostly a US phenomenon). There are administrative jobs working systems that couldn't exist without "automation" as in they would not have existed before the computer created the system. Idk. I can be swayed, i just get sick of this implication that people working for a living have influence over their employers. They don't, by design, except for managers maybe (but I'm not and never will be one of those, either) |