People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated.
What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that.
Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.
Take Moore's law for example. The doubling of transistors/halving of their expense first allowed more efficient computation in the original manner, but now that qualitative change has started to alter the very nature of computation- omnipresent computation in all man made devices doesn't mean our spreadsheets run faster, but rather humanity exchanges information and communicates in an entirely different manner than it did a generation ago.
Likewise, I believe we'll see the gradual automation of 'useless' jobs change from an event we can work around by retraining or switching careers to an obsolescence of the vast majority of human labor. There are some nagging statistics about unemployed engineers that I believe back my assumption, especially considering that engineering positions should be the new careers people retrain to.
well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.
here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad.
Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms.
What? No - not nitpick. You cherrypicked words to exclude the writer's caveat, changing the meaning, then criticised the changed meaning. Classic out-of-context quoting, especially since the writer addressed your criticism in the very same sentence you quoted.
I was responding to a particular part of the comment, hence why I highlighted that, but obviously the whole comment is right there!
My opinion, and what I was articulating is that saying
this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line
is a flippant dismissal of a serious issue.
Its like saying 'it will suck if you're a Syrian whose family gets wiped out in the civil war ... but hey we've been having wars in the Middle East for 100 years and its not particularly terrifying.'
If the maximum work complexity a person can handle is assembling hamburgers, washing dishes, moping floors, sticking one part onto another part then they are in danger of being permanently displaced by robots from ALL job categories.
I don't know how many people this is but as robots improve this number grows. How large would this number have to be, when added to current chronic levels of high unemployment, disability, nonproductive elderly/young, before society breaks down. And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing? The mind rapidly slides into what we have previously considered dystopian science fiction.
Starving?
That's the whole reason for needing drastic social changes, to figure out how to distribute resources when the raw labor of many or most of population isn't useful anymore, when paying a bare sustenance wage is more expensive than simply getting a machine to do the same thing better and faster.
Robots already can partially or fully replace diagnosticians and surgeons. Those are jobs that takes one or two decade to specialize in.
Oh, wait.
All that said, there may be a new class of unemployable people that will need to be accounted for in some way. Not sure what that is yet. I can say that I find it unfathomable that government will work on the problem prior to it becoming an issue.
In the past we've mostly been replacing a few skilled workers with lots of unskilled ones. Automation does the opposite.
And if this is possible, can people be freed to do something more useful if there is nothing more useful?