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If you look at the history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs, not a lack of jobs.

If you look at history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs - to lower paying jobs. The destruction of America's middle class should be a testament to that. People think that their middle-class salary factory jobs all moved to China, but in reality most were simply automated.

Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.

Unemployment has fluctuated dramatically over the last century as a percentage between nearly zero percent in WW2 to over 20% during the Great Depression.

> If you look at the history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs, not a lack of jobs.

I've heard that said in different ways in different places over the years. But is it a iron law of nature, or just a thing that goes on until it doesn't?

If it will eventually stop (and I think this is likely), how would you tell when it is going to stop? Would you notice if it is already happening?

Would there be a weird "jobless recovery" after economic troubles or something?

Would the factory owners as class increasingly be doing better and better, but factory employees doing worse and worse?

Is there really a historical precedent for automating the whole manufacturing process, from robotic mining machines to automated factories to delivery drones?

What happens when the car factory doesn't need workers. Who buys the cars?

If you look at history, I believe you won't be able to find any example of flexible automation that can replace about all kinds of manual labor at the same time.

Anyway, at all the examples of automation you'll find in history, you'll see lots and lots of people losing their job and starving to death because of them (more people the more prevalent is the change). At the long term, society gets into an equilibrium, at the short term, things are quite dark.