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Comment by knight17 | Hacker News Reader

This is a comment made at Yahoo news page:

  Driving trucks has been a good paying job for lots of people
 in the past. Between robot trucks and robot burger flippers,
 everything might be cheaper, but still people won't be able
 to afford anything.

We are certainly moving to uncharted waters now.

After all the automation—both mechanical and software affecting service (brain?) and labour (brawn?) industries—would there be need for humans to get things done?

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Like all automation (the wheel, the combine, ...) it pushes humans up the value chain. There is no market for coolies any more either, just like there won't be for truck drivers in 15 years.

The thing that is different is this time is that we have run the course on almost all unskilled labor now.

The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish.

The very clear issue is that not everybody can or wants to be pushed up the value chain and 'perishing' is not an option for large numbers of people in a society without that society itself perishing.

> The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish.

Nice. So will there be enough jobs in this value chain for all the unemployed truck drivers?

Less and less. When joblessness goes up more, we need to go to shorter work weeks so the benefits are distributed evenly.

The goal should be a future where everybody works a day every week or so (or not at all) and can afford a decent life style.

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