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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

My pet theory is that labor force participation declines and "automation" go hand in hand across all industries.

Automation isn't robots it's what used to be a 10 person marketing team doing the same amount of work but being more productive as they're all much more cross skilled and have more tools at their fingertips.

Same with some aspects of dev/operation. Same with some aspects of legal. Same with some aspects of medical/surgery.

The net result is that you end up with more roles that are senior level and less opportunities for entry level.

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I agree. I think the coming change is much bigger than anyone is prepared to handle..

We are in a transitional period - the utopian endpoint of technology was always to perfect/automate so much that there is no need for humans to work (except on what you want to of course), but as we get closer we have no idea what society is supposed to look like in that world.

Politicians still promise jobs, the Fed targets employment, the entirety of society is built around the idea of working to make a living. Those ideas don't even necessarily make sense in a world of increasing automation - at some point if everything keeps getting 10x more efficient, there simply won't be enough jobs of any kind to go around.

It means a transition to an entirely different way of organizing society - we don't know what it will look like and its going to be a very bumpy ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conquest_of_Bread

I agree with a slight adjustment: i actually believe it is both robotic-type of automation, as well as, fewer people forced to do more than previous workers. I think if a company makes physical things or is moe under the blue collar type of output, then maybe the percent sways slightl more towards physical automata such as robots, but also might include the "less people doing more" aspect. Now, when the companies are more knowledge-based/white collar work, then the percents flip...but again, i think this is all nuanced, and no single form of automation prevails universally.

> ...The net result is that you end up with more roles that are senior level and less opportunities for entry level.

I've felt this has been a thing for almost two decades now...And, if you're right, (and my spidey sense/tingling feeling) has been confirmed, then it would be very scary! I wonder if the apprenticeship models that have been championed and succeeded in places like Germany, will eventually force our nation to adopt them, and veer away from the traditional (college-esque) route because there simply is too few entry level options now? I'm not saying the college or the apprenticeship route is best, or if there's even room for a hyrid, just pondering based on your hypothesis, which i actually, scarily agree with.

> I actually believe it is both robotic-type of automation

It doesn't even have to be automation. A lot of it is just enormous scaling up of equipment.

For example, road building used to take hundreds or thousands of people with shovels and wheel barrows. Now it's a crew of ten or twenty people driving enormous earth moving machines. Same with farming. What used to be a guy with a horse pulling a single row planter is now a guy in a tractor with a 40 row planter.

A lot of productivity gains in industry are similar. Things get scaled up to ridiculous levels that people a hundred years ago couldn't even dream of.

Agreed, I can't deny the vast gains in efficiency. But I'm also referring more to bosses and owners of capital squeezing wherever they can, including reducing headcount but reducing work/business.

If you think about it, on average people work less than a few percent of their life. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that means about 2/3rds of a working day you are not working. Factor in vacation, weekends, national holidays and basically you get to work for about 2/3rds of the year for about 1/3rd of the time. That's a bit over 20% of your time. You do that between when you finish studying until you retire for about 40-45 years give or take. The average age in a lot of countries is close to 80. So, an average productive life, would mean working maybe 10-15% of your time. It feels like more but you spend more time sleeping (33%, assuming a healthy 8 hour rest). Some of us of course work longer and harder. But we're talking averages here.

Now of course not everybody works and quite a few of us do things that arguably aren't that critical or important. There's actually quite a bit of busywork that really doesn't matter that much to anyone; including those paying for it. Companies regularly discover they can safely fire a few percent of their workforce when the time comes to scrape out some more efficiency to please shareholders. Most of us are not really not working at all most of the time, even if we are employed.

This is a big change from pre-industrial revolution life where you worked from early age until you were physically unable to do something useful, which was shortly before death, which for those that worked hard came pretty early on average.

This is not a problem because most of the things people did then are now done by machines.

Dude you willingly forgot to take into consideration that we need to sleep 8 hours per day.

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