I agree that it's generally been true up until now that we've invented new jobs to replace those which we've automated away, but I don't think that is the whole story. Going back to at least the industrial revolution with for example handloom weavers, people who have had their jobs automated away were often impoverished for the rest of their lives. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd argue that this will be true for most displaced workers today -- any career change later in life will put you behind the curve, and it's not like someone working as a coal miner is likely to learn how to code or whatever. My thought is that these new high-tech jobs we invent have been and will be performed by new generations leaving the displaced to suffer.

I also don't think this trend of inventing new jobs will hold true forever. To the poster who asked why this would suddenly change, it's because we now have algorithms which can learn. We may be long dead (though perhaps not), but I am absolutely convinced that eventually we will invent machines which are able to perform any given task at or exceeding normal human ability. When that happens, and when we deploy it in mass across the economy, I think we'll have to face an existential crisis as a species.

Today we want everyone to have a job because we want everyone to have a means of independently supporting themselves. We want each of us to contribute to society, to not be a burden. We want people to have a job because it often provides a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose.

My thought is that, just as you say that normal people will find another job as automation advances, the attitude we will need to adopt instead will be that people in general disabled or not will need to find another means of providing meaning in their life. Because honestly, my thought when watching that commercial was not, "oh how nice that this individual is working." My thought was that the job looked terrible, is probably not good for health, and that it's not a job that human beings should even be doing. I generally think this about most jobs, but especially so about jobs where you're sorting through waste.

Real people will suffer from automation, but I think the process is inevitable, and personally wished I existed in a time where automation freed all of us to pursue what we were interested in rather than serving the purposes of making the economic machine spin round. Let it spin on its own.

> For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”

Here is the thing, this isn't as linear as you make it out to be and is seemingly not taking into account very obvious escalation of things as Society fails to deliver and fail it's populace: protests, strikes, peasant revolts, and eventually total war. You cannot exclude the lower rungs of Society and expect that because of 'progress' things will sort themselves out.

Just look at the wide-spread amount misery we've seen since 2008, people creating tent cities and the mass homelessness has led to a Humanitarian crisis, and an epidemic itself.

With that said, recycle sorting is a MVP for AI/ML applications: it's a low paid, and hard job that requires a perpetual stream of exploitable underclass based labour: even if someone would want to do the job short term out of desperation, it isn't one that will be held long term so the churn, specifically turnover, is probably not worth the cost in retraining Human based worksforce.

Matanya Horowitz a grad from CU Boulder, and eventually PhD grad from CalTech, was working on this [0] when I used to work out of the engineer department, he eventually went on to start an AI based robotics company (AMP) and raised 75 million since it's inception.

I'm also of the POV, after having done Ag myself and seeing the complexity of supply chains and the inherent pitfalls and obstacles it relies on, that farming must go at least 90% automated: primarily it is based on the fact that ~99% of the population relies on the other 1% to feed itself since that is Globally the amount of people involved in Ag--and the average age of farmers Globally is well into late 50s an early 60s. This is an imperative issue that requires more talent focus on automated processes in the laborious and most physically straining aspects that require often short-term and poorly compensated migrant labour--it's essentially slave labour 'with more steps.'

Instead of creating scripts for IT departments you should perhaps you should stop focusing your energy on such low-hanging fruit if you really believe what you wrote and focus on the major existential issues before you start wielding your technophile iron fist and talking about social engineering on this scale. Moreover a month's work of seemingly meaningless manual labour would also give you some much needed clarity and perspective.

With that said, I went from fintech founder to working for a megacorp and quit because I felt my skills were being wasted and did my last stint in kitchens right before COVID when the 'burger flippers, and food delivery people are obsolete and will be automated' rhetoric was at ATH. After COVID (which is still a thing) it's pretty clear now that reality hit those people incredibly hard, and salaries in those Industries have finally caught up with the demand from the Market as more people refused to come back and the 'automate everything' crowds are licking their wounds with mediocre results.

I went back to school to study AI and ML because I want to focus on automating Ag, and even with the leap it has amongst most other Industries, there are still a myriad of issues to work on in regards to Computer Vision and engineering feats that are optimized for crop-specific harvests and weeding.

We're getting a taste of what broken supply chains and surging costs is having to Society, and the truth is as bad as it is still (barely) working; and when food stops being delivered is when Society starts to undo itself incredibly fast.

0: https://businessden.com/2017/11/02/cu-grad-raises-3m-recycli...

1: https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2021/07/02/cu-alum-create...