[potatolicious]

Indeed, and the way we casually throw around "oh they'll find something else to do" is shameful. Many (most!) people affected by this won't be able to retrain into new, better jobs, and the knowledge economy is largely off-limits to many of them anyways.

The "retraining" argument is nothing more than a tool for our kind to disingenuously dismiss the negative impacts that come with progress.

[edit] and in the time it took to write this post someone already responded to that effect, hurray HN predictability :)

[dannymick]

Exactly!

Taxi cab drivers, in NYC, who own their medallions have taken out huge loans in order to obtain the right the drive people in New York City. They can't just "retrain"/find another job when they've got to continue driving 12 hours a day just to make ends meet and pay off their loan.

[potatolicious]

Even the drivers who aren't under loan obligations can't just "retrain" - where are the educational resources? How do they come up with the money to stop working and go back to school?

And even if they are magically able to obtain the funds and time and ability to retrain, what kind of environment do they then face?

Imagine if a taxi driver somehow got their hands on $20K and went to hacker school. What kind of treatment does a hypothetical 40 year-old ex-taxi-driver-turned-programmer face when interviewing for entry level programming jobs, in an industry infamous for its ageism and obsession with pedigree?

None of this adds up. In reality the loss of entire industries means chronic unemployment and under-employment for most. We can prop up the outliers who manage to successfully move to other fields all we want, that doesn't make the poverty and desperation that results any less real.

Now we can argue that the suffering of millions of people is a necessary part of progress, but pretending that these people will just magically fly off to other jobs is a level of classist lunacy that's only tenable for someone who has never stepped outside their little upper class white collar bubble.