What total bullshit. No advance in mechanisation has ever resulted in this happening. What happens is that the workers get the days off, but it's not holidays, it's being unemployed.
Can you point to some source of this information? I'm asking because when I look at the data I see that for example industrial revolution was correlated with: 1. Reduced length of a work-day. 2. Increased lifetime expectancy as well as overall quality of life. 3. Elimination of child labor.
And all of this happening while general population was growing.
I just wonder why this could be different?
Ultimately it is political conditions, rather than technological, which determine typical working period lengths. For example, despite relatively little difference in technology or economic activity, African-American agricultural workers in the US South shifted to dramatically shorter working periods following abolition. Only the political conditions of slavery enabled slave-owners to compel a longer working day than would normally be tolerated by workers.
And while technology can increase the amount of surplus wealth generated, it can't change the distribution of that surplus (at least not on its own). Factory work increased the value per hour produced by laborers but it took labor organization and mass strikes to shorten the work day. It took women's suffrage and widespread moral outrage to stop child labor (which was far harsher in early factories than it ever was in agriculture). It took government intervention via social security and medicare to extend the life-expectancy of average laborers (in the US, though the equivalent programs in other developed countries had similar effects).
Basically, employers aren't going to give time off or other benefits just because they want to or just because they can afford to. At least not in any great numbers. They're going to do it because political or market conditions compel it, such as when Henry Ford increased the pay of factory workers dramatically to prevent them from working for his competitors. But market conditions are stacked against the laborers getting greater benefits in this situation. Employers are substituting robots for their labor and so their labor is less in demand and thus demands a lower price (benefits + pay). So with increased mechanization and automation, the average laborer can't demand more benefits in the market while still maintaining wages. Barring political/legal pressure, employers will simply pocket the surplus from this situation rather than charitably donating it to their workers in the form of PTO or other benefits.
It isn't necessarily bad that workers get laid off, because that frees them to pursue more remunerative or fulfilling activities. But we can't rely on employers to help workers transition after disruption in the labor market, just as we couldn't rely on employers to set reasonable working days or to not hire child laborers.
In the general sense, this might not work since white collar jobs are also subject to automation. For example, we don't need as many lawyers combing through legal documents when search algorithms can do the job. If anything, it's easier for computer systems to manipulate digitalized information than work in the physical domain.
In a more specific sense, if for example USA invested more in education, it would do little to help those who would be replaced by farm automation. The majority of farm workers are immigrants on temporary H2A visas or undocumented: http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/farm-wor...
Globally, this situation is pretty worrying. How do we share resources when input is not even required from most people? How do we keep people occupied and give them purpose in life? People without purpose in life are the ones who will happily vote/act to trash the system after all.
I've thought for a while that if you really want to change the world, find a way to profit from unskilled labour in the Western world (where minimum wages, welfare systems exist) in a distributable and scalable way, that can't be replaced by robots.
It seems that jobs on average now are "lower quality" than jobs then, but maybe the better take on that growth, given the headwinds, is that it has not been so bad?
The employment ratio of population has steadily dropped. Economists call it the 'labor participation rate', and it has declined quite markedly since ~2000 or so:
http://www.alhambrapartners.com/2018/01/05/the-reluctant-lab...
See the 'Two Labor Stories' chart.
"The lack of labor force growth going on nearly a decade now means that in every likelihood there remains a deep pool of American labor from among which Americans would work if there was any (at the margins) to be hired at a decent rate."
Long history: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
LPR initially went up as women joined the workforce; it peaked around 1997.
It's fairly clear that more jobs would be better for the US work force; it's less clear whether automation is the main thing driving the reduction in job "quality" and labor force participation.
My father works primarily on building various automation units in textile factories. I'm hazy on the technicalities, but one such unit he built a few years ago crushed coal and fired it into a huge furnace, the heat of which is used by the factory for various purposes. Most factories in the city use these units now. Before that however, there were men (there still are). They'd work in shifts of 10-12 hrs everyday. Shirtless, they shovelled coal into mouth of the furnace non-stop until the furnace was hot enough, take a break of 10-15 minutes, maybe less, and start again. And these weren't small kitchen furnaces, these were huge. At 20 feet away, you can feel the heat envelop and drain fluids from your body (a small 'mis-flare' nearly burnt my father's face). The city easily touches around 43 °C (109 °F) in summers, so it's not like we live in a cool place either. You should see how their bodies look. These men toil away their entire lives on extremely cheap labour, contract all kinds of diseases, and when their sons grow up, they get into the same business, because that's the only thing they know and it's "financially risk free". And there were so many of them. In short term, sure the machines take away jobs. In the long term they take the entire demand away. When pushing against automation, people forget that modern society currently stands on the back of such people. The faster we automate these, lesser number from the next generation gets into these. It should be easier to solve unemployment IMHO.
Hand-waving and saying 'job training' and 'education' isn't a solution for about 10% of the population. I don't know what the solution is. But, the number of people who are excluded from the marketplace due to tech is increasing rapidly. Not good to have 15%+ of a poulation unemployable. Leads to breakdown and instability.
If more people are brought through the experiences, they will be able to perform the tasks. It's accumulating failures through experience, and then repeating the actions that causes skill. Not some magical IQ.
They are online by the way.