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> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person] could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?

There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5 million on SSI (considered completely unfit for work, the US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired. Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three categories because there is no job that would be a good fit for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don't even know about.

> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time.

That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a short sample size relative to geologic time.

Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work, etc., what becomes of the Waffle House and Walmart worker? There will be a lower bound capability threshold, and automation will eventually exceed that.

I think a smart comparison would be to look at what job opportunities are available to the intellectually disadvantaged.

Then what happens when that lower bound inches higher?

Ya, when people use this argument ask them "the population of humans always grows right?" Because up till recently that was the consensus unless something drastic or terrible happened. Then in the past few decades we see people having far fewer children then even replacement rate.

Upsetting the labor market is leading us into unpredictable territory, much like at the start of the 1900s and the automobile set off a string of events that lead to two massive world wide wars.

In principle, they could probably just buy their own robots and start their own businesses. Locality is its own quality for SMEs. Whether or not that happens in practice is anyone's guess.

The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create?

All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and with how things are currently going, only a few players have the capability of building and deploying it.

I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming? My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI" because, I think, we're implicitly talking about terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of your choice.

Your kids are artificial general intelligence?

Fine. Artificial intelligence. I'm still waiting on the General.

Presumably the interests of an AGI could be designed into it. It could be made to have programming be the center of its existence.

Even if it couldn't be designed in, then if we accept your analogy with people, we could simply generate AGIs until we found one that was interested in programming, then clone as many copies of it as we needed.

Poor countries have with little physical or financial infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create actual VALUE, in economic sense.

Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire tech sector, software developers and IT get fully automated - well, now all the VALUABLE services those companies provide are much much cheaper. All the savings are passed on to their customers (B2b and B2c) who will now spend those savings doing things they couldn't afford to before - and THOSE industries are where jobs will move to.

For a more simplistic example, imagine cost of electricity (or some raw materials) dropped 10x, would it lead to fewer jobs or more jobs? Of course more jobs, since you'll be able to do a lot more now.

While I understand your point it seems to only focus on one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy.

Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine, legal and everything else and ask what would those people do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for which we don't need so many people.

As with any productivity boost - if you need 100x fewer IT jobs, it doesn't mean you will cut your IT by 100x, you will instead increase just grow your IT department 100x or however much until you hit a growth bottleneck on the business side, then some jobs will shift there.

Just like my raw materials/energy cost example before, if you something becomes cheap - you don't consume less of it, you try to do more with it. Maybe, so much more that you can now do things which were completely impossible/unaffordable before!

It's very possible we will have MORE IT jobs due to new opportunities and efficiencies.

A decent software developer costs $40/hr. Let's say you can make your small iPhone app idea in 100 hours, that's $4,000. If developer with 100x as productive, now that costs only $40. That doesn't only mean more people can afford to build their ideas, but you could build BIGGER ideas, on a $4,000 budget you could now build $400,000 worth of an application! Think of all the opportunities for everyone!