Comment by wordpad25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wordpad25 | Hacker News Reader

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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!

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