[xnx]

Misleading

> Among the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census, only one job was automated away — elevator operator. But many others were rendered obsolete by new technology, like the job of telegraph operator.

In that same time farm jobs went from 15% of the workforce to 2%.

[zeroonetwothree]

Farm employment itself has decreased 4x compared to 1950 (the % figure overstates it since the total workforce is larger). However if we consider the broader "food" industry employment has increased substantially.

Thus we may see "coder" employment decrease but the broader "software/tech" industry increase in employment.

[5701652400]

nonsense. you are shifting definitions of what "coding" / "producing/operating software" as a profession is.

by this logic, if I define "food" industry as sitting on my couch as a "job", with govenment (payouts) my employment, you get "food" industry at employment at 100%!

once you start shifting definitions, it is slippery slope. you can prove anything and argue anything. and it is all loosing meaning. tactic usually employed to confuse and mislead people.

[pramodbiligiri]

They seem to address that: "This is sharply different from occupations such as agriculture in which labor demand was famously decimated due to mechanization and automation. The difference is that the amount of calories people consume is relatively fixed — even a 25% increase led to the obesity epidemic — whereas the amount of software produced has grown a millionfold."

[kurthr]

I think that the amount of software produced has gone up by much more than a million fold since 1950. The first thing I would consider software and not flipping hardware switches was Assembly Language described in a book by Kathleen and Andrew Booth in 1947 and the phrase Assembly was first used to describe it in 1951. Even that is normally called firmware today.

That doesn't really mean to me that we have another million or billion-fold increase in utility coming, unless we're just counting lines of code. I don't need 1000 more apps on my phone or computer. Are we saying that every webpage and video is software, because they're already encoded in js and H264? or is it just the browser? the OS? How much more do we really need or even want?

Is it just that soon we'll all need to have "agents" working for us to protect us from the other "agents' that are trying to steal what we have? Is that the utility? Who's going to pay more for it?

It seems like we're already at the point where we pay about as much as people are willing to for software. It's already gone to the subscription model. You're already the product for advertising. It's already being enshitified to eke out some extra margin. It's already ~10% of GDP. It just can't grow much more without adding some new utility rather than just replacing what's already there. It needs to create something other than unemployment.

But if it doesn't create anything new, it will be the Tractor to Jevon's Paradox.

[chneu]

Look up the logging industry. Like 95% of those jobs are automated now, but they like to blame an owl

[5701652400]

yep. selective usage of stats at their best. how about factories too? conveyer belts? people losing their jobs all the time whenever automation comes in. and we just "hope" for the best they can find jobs or delusional hopefulness swinging into extremes ("be generalist!", "be specialist!", "work in service!", "learn to code!", "learn to mine coal!"), all incoherent. just listen to @pmarca to see how totally lost and incoherent tech leadership is.

check Stripe Press latest on indutrial automation: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency