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by pchristensen
4443 days ago
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In 1920: agriculture was 27% of labor force: http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm Now, 2-3%. One in 4 people had their profession superseded. A lot of that slack was taken up by industry (and war and death), but that took 20-30 years to catch up. Is there a pool of work for people to absorb 25% of the present labor force? Most of the emerging technologies I see are labor-saving, not labor consuming. Two possibilities for big labor demand in the next few decades:
- healthcare and assistance for the elderly
- removing development restrictions in booming cities, unleashing an epic (or Chinese-level) building boom Both have fundamental political foundations and won't be solved solely by technology. |
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Which would be interesting because it is debatable whether we have the resources for that.
On one hand, we have people like Tim Worstall of Forbes claiming that we will never run out of metals that would be used in a building boom, because innovation reduces and replaces use of existing metals, e.g. modern day pennies use steel and a copper coating:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/15/when-are-...
Although, I think Tim takes a lot of liberty with his assessments, like his recent wild speculation that humanity could never populate another star system because it would take too many people to preserve our culture: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/07/perhaps-c...
On the other hand, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore#Available_iron_ore_res... it states that Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute has suggested iron ore could run out within 64 years based on an extremely conservative extrapolation of 2% growth per year, and so if there were a boom, innovation to replace use of iron ore as a structural component would be required.