This is fascinating. Can you please point me somewhere I can learn more about automation increasing employment? When I google it I just get a bunch of highly political pieces about robots stealing jobs.
The "good case" was typesetting. The introduction of the Linotype enormously increased the volume of material printed and created more printing and typesetting jobs.
The "medium case" was bottle making. Hand-made bottles were expensive, taking a trained group of about five people to blow a bottle. Machine-made made bottles were cheaper, and required far fewer people to make. Cheaper bottles increased demand for bottles, but, overall, employment in bottle making was about the same or less. Also, much of the labor was now low-skill machine tending - putting in sand, taking out bottles. Only a small number of bottle-making machine experts were needed.
The "bad case" was the stone planer. Brick buildings used to have stone lintels over doors and windows, and there was an industry of big guys with chisels hammering out those things. The stone planer was simply a big steam powered planer for stone slabs. This required far fewer people. But it didn't increase demand for stone lintels, because they were a minor building component, not significant enough in cost to increase demand for brick buildings.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7pNJ9aQxRMrWAnkmf/thank-you-...
That article is essentially refuting itself.