If American thought leaders such as Larry Summers think that technology destroys jobs and that it's a relatively recent phenomenon, then America is truly screwed.
After hundreds of years of virtually the same argument being made, I think the burden is on you to say why this time is different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#Pre...
2) It's less of unemployment argument than reduced value argument. Unemployment is result from the lower limit for the living wage. People in India can find work for $1 per day even in automated society. If we are willing to reverse wage increases, remove laws regulating working conditions and remove all kinds of welfare, we can keep people employed for very long time.
3) In the past people could just leave menial jobs and pick a new job that required more intellectual capacity. We are reaching the limit where average Joe has no intellectual capacity that would increase their value in economy.
You'd have more rested people being more productive and have more people employed while giving an opportunity for improved work-life balance.
That and on-the-job training seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.
The obvious place to start is the horse: the horse population in the US peaked at 26M in 1917 and had declined to 3M by 1960, almost 1/10th of its peak value [0].
When those horses were unemployed by the automobile, we did not retrain them in new lines of work. They just died. It got so bad that conversation societies were established to protect endangered breeds.
Eventually we created a handful of new jobs in the recreational sector for them, so the population of horses is rising now, but it is nowhere close to the peak value, and of course we did not create those jobs within the lifetime of any displaced horse.
In fact what the historical record shows is that massive technological shocks produce long-term unemployment. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a horse, because of course they're just resources to be exploited in the furtherance of human goals. But then again, so are you.
[0] http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
Technological disruption is not new. It's been around forever. If your theory stands true, then how come that overall, the global economy is growing? Doesn't it mean that we've created more jobs that we've destroyed?
What about the other important element no one seems to care about in this conversation: the jobs created - very often - require a higher level of skills and specialization.
The number of jobs does not correlate to GDP growth [0]. So whether "the economy is growing" is not terribly related to whether jobs are being created. This is somewhat puzzling under Adam-Smith-Wealth-of-Nations ideas about economics, but it's an empirical fact.
> Technological disruption is not new. It's been around forever.
You seem to be misunderstanding the argument; I'm not arguing for something new. I'm arguing that negative effects of technological shock are well-attested in the historical record: you can look back at historical data and plainly see them.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/business/economy/us-growth...
It's hard to accept because the people hit are not necessarily those that will benefit from the newly created opportunities. But if History is clear on one thing, it's that the number of winners outweighs the losers.
Every economy that resists creative destructions in favor of short term social peace ends up watching prosperity pass by.
As the Wiki page you linked to says, stopping unemployment depends on "compensation effects ensur[ing] there is never a long term negative impact on jobs". So, by default, technology will put people out of work, and there's no guarantee that some counterbalancing factor will always materialize. The amount of meaningful work that humans can engage in is certainly not infinite.
Of course, it's not a guarantee that technology will continue to improve either, at least not at a faster rate than the counterbalancing factor. As it happens, it's very hard to predict the future. But it's not unreasonable to try. And right now, it looks very much like tech will keep marching forward, and jobs outside of tech will not.
A self-driving car, for example, is just a regular car (old technology) with some servos attached (old technology) and a few sensors added (old technology) and a computer (old technology), with self-driving software (new technology).
Put a million drivers out of work with self-driving cars, and you don't open up a million jobs building self-driving cars. The number of cars needed doesn't go up much. The demand for servos and sensors goes up, but making those is largely automated already. Maybe some servo or sensor companies have to add another shift...so they hire a handful of humans to watch the machines on the new shift.
Before, when we replaced a human we were generally replacing him with a new machine. Now we are more just making the old machine that the human was operating operate without the human.
The thing people forget when comparing to past technological advances is that for the largest part of history unemployment was 90%+ at the best of times, ever since a few hundred years into the Roman Empire, if you count subsistence farming as unemployment (and since people didn't do that unless they had to, you should).
I think this is what's really happening. The economy is reverting to it's natural state. Of course for most of us that's not a good description of what's happening. Better would be to say "conditions are returning to what they were in the middle ages".
Space colonies? That or war.
Aren't you doing exactly the same thing as the industrialists who slandered the Luddites? You're reducing the real welfare of thousands of workers and their families to "oh, they're scared of technology, just ignore the silly primitives."