But I wish I could find a more significant example of some industry that was huge and is now entirely gone due to modernization.
So, let's not fool ourselves with predictions. We are notoriously bad a predicting long term trends.
PS: the analogy with horse is wrong in so many ways (because horses are not humans and cannot adapt like humans) but this would be another topic altogether.
The problem is that throughout human history the demand for unskilled labor has exceeded the supply, and that has been the foundation of our social contract: work, and you eat. Don't, and you starve. But some day soon, technology could make that assumption no longer true, at which point we could have big problems unless we radically rethink how our society is organized. That is something we humans have historically not been very good at.
Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth"
If we all put our backs into it, we can make sure that we need at least that many.
We just have to write really bad documentation and really sloppy code, which lot of people believe we are doing already.
With a bit of effort maintaining the software being written today will become such a monumental task that no Soft Eng will ever be out of work for millenia to come.
Automation makes things cheaper. Look at food, it was the largest expense for most families for a very long time. Now for most families in the US it's not even close. We have taken the jobs that used to be in that area and gotten rid of them, and instead moved them into service industries like the ones I referenced above. Making things cheaper means more disposable income to be spent on luxury/nonessential items, which creates a market which didn't really exist, which in turn creates jobs. This is not hard stuff here.
But what if for almost every human supplied product/service there's a good enough machine substitue, or even just a human substitue that demands very little labor ? couldn't we reach a stable state of high unemployment ?
I call them "creative professionals who do what they do by choice".
The majority of non essential work is not "movie stars and Michelin chefs", it's either automatable burger flipping or bureucratic busy-work created to overcome the lack of a system for distributing social wealth outside of "roll around for it".
To put it in another way, we could maintain our current production and give free massages and pedicures to everyone with far fewer jobs than we have now.
My take is that we use the labor that was being used in farms for new productive purposes including health, education (as consumption, not investment) and entertainment. It's undeniable that life expectancy is increasing so we are getting something out of this increased efficiency.
When the fox's shoulders went under water, I bet some of the fleas said "ten minutes ago 70% of us lived below the fox's shoulders and yet they're all still on the fox, so there's nothing to worry about."
The difference with robots though is that they can actually 100% out perform humans in the not to distant future. Once a robot has hands as agile and controllable as ours, and once they have energy requirements that are cheaper than ours, I don't see how humans could compete with them in non-cerebral jobs. And there is a good segment of the population that can only do physical work.
The price per pint is roughly 2x what it'd cost in a store, but the milk is fresh, organic, delivered to our door - and very importantly for us - generates very little waste. The empty glass bottles go back with the milkfloat, so we use far less plastic cartons.
You may be 100% correct in this case, but in general, I think this is a very hard thing to discern, especially without a pretty deep analysis.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but I would think that 'price' is highly correlated to efficiency of the product delivery pipeline and efficiency is probably well correlated to 'waste'. The major confounding factors would be understanding what externalities are (or are not) being included into the final price and the distortions introduced administratively by government policies.
So a 2x price factor, to me, is indicative of possible inefficiencies relative to store distributed milk but certainly not definitive.
First, the volumes are much smaller. A large store chain can negotiate prices lower because they will be shifting a lot more product. The effect on unit margins adds up on both sides of the equation.
Second, the cost of labour. A grocery store should have a fairly big figure for units sold per employee. (Not just milk, but everything they sell.)
Third, we are obviously paying for service and convenience. The milk is delivered fresh, early in the morning. We just open the door and get the bottles. The fact that the empty bottles are taken away for no extra effort is an additional convenience factor, but one of the big reasons we originally went for a milkman service.
Number four - the milkman company is a business. They need to make a profit too.
Because the company operates with a dairy, I can probably discount the cost of specific cold chain maintenance. They would be maintaining the equipment and cooling in any case due to the products.
We could get groceries delivered from the shops, but that is still less convenient. The delivery slots are either during the day or in the evening, and we need to be at the door. Delivery is an extra charge, and priced so that it makes economical sense to order a lot more in one batch. This actually adds a disincentive to ordering milk: we enjoy fresh milk, and with longer delivery intervals it sure wouldn't be as fresh when we drink it.
And finally: the amount of plastic waste, even with our reduction tactics, is pretty significant. If we bought our milk from the store, we would need at least one more plastic recycling crate to hold all the milk cartons.
(I kid, I kid)
- wooden barrels / casks for wine beer
- coppersmith (not sure about the exact term. i mean people who create pans and pots by hand)
- basketmaker
- coachbuilder