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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well.

It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.

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Human computers were automated by computers and created the programming jobs. But we have many more of those than ever and it seems to increase even more.

There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased.

For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools.

The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.

Agree with your broad point, but minor nitpick about soldiers: we've substantially cut armed forces personnel, because they're hellaciously expensive with benefits.

https://historyinpieces.com/research/us-military-personnel-1...

While there are no human computers who actually add and multiply, there is a lot of programmers. But this is not because they replaced human computers 1:1, it's because electronic computers have replaced huge swaths of everything around us. I go to my kitchen, of all places, and I see my microwave oven, my coffee machine, my bread-making machine, even likely my gas stove all run by small embedded computers. To say nothing of the advanced computer attached to a bunch of radio interfaces most everyone carries around these days.

I'd say this has more to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I think your last assumption is correct. Agriculture, textiles, automobiles, and food production (not restaurants) have all seen significant automation, while office jobs have actually increased.

Very good point, the physical labour we still see has survived 100+ years of attempted automation so is very resilient to it (relatively speaking). Whereas there is still a lot of office works that you can look at and quite easily think "there must be a way for a machine to handle that".

Only if the wages keep increasing across the board and globally. Else there is no incentive for investment.

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