Hacker News Reader

Comment by st3v3r | Hacker News Reader

Because it's not the same? People moved from subsistence farming to factory work because there were jobs, and they didn't require a whole lot of specialized skill or training to do. Now those factory jobs are going away, and there isn't anything really taking it's place.

There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?

View on HN

My point is it's never the same. No two technological advances are the same. We should be celebrating the fact that labor-saving tech is freeing us from mundane jobs. The goods produced by those jobs will be cheaper for everyone. Technological progress always brings jobs that require more skill, yet somehow over the last two centuries we have always had room for unskilled workers.

Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.

What does it matter that the goods are cheaper if you don't have a job to provide income to purchase said goods?

And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.

You realize that you could have made the same argument over the past 200 years? "Who'll buy all the farm produce when there are no fRm workers left?"

The difference is massive economic growth between the industrial revolution and today. Jobs lost to industrialization were quickly replaced as the economy grew exponentially in size and complexity.

Today growth is very anemic owing to market saturation and declining birth rates.

> There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver".

That was bogus, it had to do with the fact that "Truck Driver" didn't have fine-grained sub-classification in the taxonomy, while jobs like "teacher" did.

Similarly suspect statistics put the average age of commercial drivers at 55 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-14/2014-outl...

The average 55 year old has nothing to fear from semi-autonomous vehicle technology affecting their careers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com