Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

> The rise of horseless carriages, mass production and other new forms of automation in the first two decades of the 20th century created anxieties about the future of work and employment.

I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.

Recording and mechanical reproduction did cause the social(!) and economic value of small-time talent in the arts to plummet from "pretty high, actually" to "basically zero". That never recovered.

To no small degree, the US has coped with the effects of automation with huge public spending on the military (a massive blue-collar jobs program, effectively) and a painfully-inefficient healthcare system (a massive white-collar jobs program). Both are post-war (as in, WWII) developments. I have a feeling our optimism about the effects of further automation on unemployment would be rather bleaker without the action of those two very-expensive systems in mitigating the effects of past automation.

[EDIT] Oh, you can add the effects of pushing a whole lot more people into college to the list of expensive things we do that mitigate the effects of automation on employment. Keeping millions more people out of the workforce for an extra four years or more is a pretty big deal. Also a post-war development (the GI Bill was what kicked off that trend)

> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.

Exactly. The buggy drivers became tax drivers, the horses became glue.

The automobile was a great invention for the participants on the right side of that bell-curve, and absolutely horrible for the participants on the left side of the bell-curve.

There's no guarantee, universal law, or dogmatic hit-the-brakes switch which will ensure that (without a major economic adjustment) further technological development won't put an ever-growing fraction of people to the left of the 'useful enough to be employable for a living wage' side of the bellcurve.

> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.

Don't forget farmers. Most americans were farmers in the early 1900s. Today it's about 1%.

Sure, jobs were eventually created for the unemployed farmers but "robots taking all the jobs" was a cataclysmic event in the early 1900s. You could argue it was the driving force for much of the 20th century. WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out". The excess population was also a reason for the anti-immigration movement that dominated the first half of the 1900s.

"Robots taking our jobs" isn't the end of the world. But it can be very painful.

I actually wonder if the farmer metric is true ?

Get outta here robut!

> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".

Source?

> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".

No. Some actual reasons for WW1: Franco-German animosity, the famous web of alliances, advances in weapon technology and accompanying arms races, nationalism, and cold geopolitical calculus (Germany thought their power relative to the other Great Powers would decline in the future).

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