> Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument
What would you count as a single human example of human workers becoming obsolete? This has happened many times. About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%. Machines and technology have replaced the rest of the labor needed to grow our food.
Let's say the 96% number is from 1750, which I think is roughly right.
World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs.
The human workforce has expanded almost 10x in this period.
Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.
When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.
This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.
But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.
Actually, what's happening in automation is not what people expected. We still don't have good robot manipulation in unstructured situations. Machine learning gave us automation of "higher" functions first.
The current result is a growth in really dumb jobs, like Amazon warehouse pickers. The computers do almost all the thinking. Humans just pick up things where told to do so and put them somewhere else. Such jobs have no promotion path.
This is the "machines should think, people should work" revolution.
I doubt this.
In the USA, we have an unemployment number, “able bodied, but not working, or looking for work.” If the 50’s, it was basically housewives. Today it’s a lot of people. (This might not be the exact wording the government uses.)
My point is this number is huge, and never talked about much in the United States. I don’t think the government even has a way of tracking the number?
I don’t know how the rest of the world treats this number.
My guess would be most don’t have jobs, or if that number crossed 50% in any country, the jobs would not be of a livable wage living alone.
India deliberately chose not to automate agriculture. They still have about 50% agricultural workers. Recent attempts to change this have resulted in riots.[1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/Reuters/videos/242972323968171/
Absolutely correct. And the entities employing those tools are called "Capital".