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by selter01 4698 days ago
Who knows. Unskilled workers make me sad.
3 comments

It gets worse. What if skilled workers are skill in a field that becomes suddenly redundant? Think about payroll clerks who typed out checks every two weeks; now it's all done by computers, databases and spreadsheets. Even skilled workers are not necessarily immune.

Of course that merely shows that there is a problem, it doesn't show what to blame or how to fix it in general.

The problem is that all of the technology we've created as a society (sharing science, funding from the government, allowing resource harvesting from public land) is being used to make workers obsolete, but instead of honoring the communal investment in technology by making a strong safety net where people can live, further training/education, and thrive, making our economy even stronger, we allow the corporations and uber-rich to dodge taxes (and hoard the hundreds of billions of dollars that could support that safety net).
Or wagon manufacturers when automobiles took over. Or manual farm workers when plows and then tractors took over.
Remember how we used to have telephone switchboard operators?
Even better, remember when people used to talk on "party lines" with no privacy at all?
What happens when Silicon-Valley-tech of the week skilled workers become redundant and they're suddently "unskilled"? That makes me sad.
If some "tech-of-last-week-skilled" workers can't become "tech-of-next-week-skilled" workers in that proverbial week, then they already are unskilled workers and should be treated as such.
Why? Most jobs in the world require no special skill not picked up on the job.

In all seriousness, the world needs ditch diggers too.

I suppose you could call that skilled, but I would have put that under the on the job training I had mentioned.
As Eliezer says, if personal maids, cooks, and servants suddenly become affordable, only then might we have an unskilled labourer problem (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...)