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The real issue on the employment front is that we humans imagined job automation backwards from how it's really happening. We assumed that jobs would be automated from "menial" to "advanced". First would go lots of farm labor, then manual servants, then eventually factory workers, and by the time it reached educated, white-collar middle-class folks, the world would hit post-scarcity and we'd all become artists and writers and scientists. Instead, it has ended up proceeding: farm labor, a minority of manual servants, some but not all factory workers, and finally most white-collar middle class jobs. The white-collar middle-class jobs were the brain jobs, were always based on the manipulation of data, and therefore turned out more amenable to encoding in software than almost anything else. So the future is looking more and more like this: a sizable but weakly employed class of menial factory/physical laborers for the physical things too customized to automate, a smaller "middle class" to actually run specialized machinery (machinery whose operation requires knowledge of what it does rather than knowledge of "how to use Windows XP"), a small elite of upper-middle class innovators with hyper-advanced knowledge and hyper-competitive lifestyles (Hacker News, this is your future), and the capitalist class itself. What replaces the standard-issue job for common people? Nothing. In its place, we have a mass of unemployed people where the old class of mid-skilled blue and white collar workers used to be. Any time a piece of work would require employing massive numbers of manual workers, it becomes amenable to specialized, programmatic automation. Unemployment will become a fact of life as common as we currently consider, say, not owning land. |