[samselikoff]

I don't think the alternative is to sit around and do nothing. Economies are much more dynamic than that, and while it's true some may suffer in the short-run, it's wouldn't be like that forever.

At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong."

I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.

[digikata]

Some of them might even be judged as getting paid for a net negative effect to society...

[samselikoff]

Absolutely, I wasn't saying that farmers in pre-industrial America didn't contribute anything. My point was that once tech displaced the majority of their jobs, they didn't all just sit around and not do anything.

Technology freed up their labor from producing food and allowed them to produce things like automobiles, textiles and eventually computers. The idea that new tech will leave large parts of the population with absolutely nothing to do has been suggested before, but we still have no example of it actually happening, and in fact, far more examples of the reverse.

[JoeAltmaier]

Easy to say from the vantage point of history. But folks starved, died when their livelihood disappeared.

http://webs.bcp.org/sites/vcleary/ModernWorldHistoryTextbook...