Ask HN: Startup ideas with positive labor market effects?
Today's tech seems to be the opposite. Lots of modern tech startup ideas seem to be about finding low-skill jobs and automating them away.
Are there any startup ideas that, if successful, would result in lots of jobs for low-skill workers?
Over the years I've met lots of people who'd be good screwing bolts on cars, but regardless of training, I don't think would ever be very good at all at the kind of abstract logical thinking required to be successful software engineers.
50 years ago you could get a job right out of high school screwing bolts on cars that paid well enough for a house with a yard, two kids, a non-working spouse and a car or two.
Nowadays all the bolts are screwed by robots or overseas, and good luck renting an apartment in an area where you won't get robbed or worse walking home at night, and feeding yourselves without food stamps if you and your spouse both work at Walmart or McDonald's. Kids? Homeownership? Proper medical care? Today such luxuries are for the rich and the software engineers. As the latter, life's not so bad for me personally, but I hate how the lack of opportunity is tearing our society apart.
What kinds of Industrial Revolution 2.0 could reverse this trend? What startup idea, if it works, finds product-market fit, investment, and rolls out at society-wide scale, would result in a semi-permanent labor shortage of low-skill workers that enables ordinary people to make a good middle-class living again?
(I think PG may have discussed this problem in one of his essays but I don't think he asked exactly the same question I'm asking.)