I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.
If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.
That there are jobs available is only one part of the problem. Where are the jobs relative to the people about to be unemployed? How many people are we about to, under the threat of starvation, tell to move possibly across the country for work? How many communities will be destroyed? How many people will be utterly severed from any and all social support systems that they now have?
For that matter, how many of those jobs are themselves stable? Or will they need to repeat this traumatic process in another ten years after another industry "disruption" leads to yet more automation?
This whole system was supposed to be for people, right? Because it sure seems to me that the human factors in all these discussions get shockingly lost quite quickly and we revert to treating people like rack nodes that can be moved to a different part of our server farm at a moment's notice, should the need for compute be higher over there than it is here, and there are no side effects to that, nothing lost in the transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you're the type of person who's comfortable moving cross country to chase a higher salary or a dream job, more power to you. I certainly was. Now ask yourself if you would be so enthusiastic if it wasn't your decision and was, in fact, imposed on you by the actions of your employer. I wonder if automation would make so much tremendous sense to you if you yourself were the one on the chopping block, who's livelihood and life was about to be upended so widgets could be made 80 cents cheaper each.
I don't have a problem with automation on principle: I think any labor saving tech is unambiguously a good thing. I am however thoroughly tired of self-appointed, unelected leaders of private industry laying waste to the communities that built the companies they run so cavalierly, simply because they can now make their products either with the hands of more exploitable people overseas, or with robots.
This is exactly what he meant by "you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills." You don't start at the same rank when you change careers. You start at the bottom.
We should thank our lucky stars if a robot takes all their job. That's progress.
I've met a lot of people who couldn't find the job they wanted in the place they wanted anymore and joined Tech along the US coast, for the predominant wages which are a factor of supply and demand.
Look at top 10 jobs by employment, all of them are 100+ years old. Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people, not ‘leveraged crypto-equity portfolio manager’
C dates back to the early 70s, and computers weren't really ubiquitous until the 90s or so. So does computer programming in general make your cutoff?
Or does it date back to Babbage in the 1800s?
Art is still art, whether you paint with oil or on an iPad. Doesn’t quite count.