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Another report: As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up. So net effect: not much. Point being that for centuries, we have been automating things that were done by humans at some point in time. Not much different even today.

Take one example of cellphones. It probably eliminated many "jobs" for people working in landline industries in the last decade or so BUT it probably added a lot more jobs in the telecom industry in general.

EDIT: based on some replies, I am not dismissing the fact completely that automation can have impacts on jobs. They definitely do but the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish. It is the "type" of job that is changed which could surely be a problem for the displaced workers because they might not have the new skillset/experience ready to be employed.

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That is (very likely) true in the long run, but it would be foolish to overlook the short-term effects that can be devastating for many individuals.

The weavers faced real problems, had a real existential crisis and struggled with real poverty and hunger for many decades. Yes, the industrial revolution brought a tremendous increase in wealth and living standards to everyone, but only eventually to everyone.

It is tremendously important to take care of the people who are cast by the wayside by those changes.

These short term effects are exactly what the Luddites were against.[1] They may have gotten a bad reputation, but they had real problems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I agree with this. Not sure how viable, but it'd be nice to see some kind of federal program which allowed for a 5-year transition program for people where their industries collapse precipitously (by some definition) and are guaranteed 100% their wages but must study/prepare for a new career.

Not sure how to avoid the occasional dilly-dallier who thought they'd make a good chef, but maybe we'd just have to put up with that fact.

To address the dilly dally issue you would more than likely have to only give the transitional aid to someone involved in Science, Engineering, and Math fields, much like current STEM¹ scholarships.

¹https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5257

How is it true in the long run when we have robots that can walk talk and think as well as our bottom 40% but take one tenth the cost in food / shelter?

To be honest, I’m probably not as sure about the long term effects as I might have sounded. Looking into the past I see almost universally massively positive long-term effects. A few centuries ago almost everyone worked in farming, now almost nobody does, all those jobs have been automated away – but it didn’t matter in the long run because more people could work first in industry, then in services.

Maybe future transformations will work out similarly. However, even if they don’t many solutions for the short-term problems can easily be made to work as solutions for possible long-term problems.

Automation eliminates jobs - that's the whole point. One robot replaces 20 workers and you only need 1 person per every 20 robots to manage them.

Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...

You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper.

So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs.

It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)

The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?

If that point in time comes, and the computers still "obey" humans, yet still have enough control so that there are no wars between different computer groups, then nobody will have a job and we'll just ask robots to make us stuff and they'll mine other planets and make stuff for us, and we'll live in outerspace in spaceships and relax a lot.

WALL-E?

hopefully we won't be obese though. Because science will have solved that problem by then.

Artisan economy? But it can't be monetarily based because only the few remaining capital owners and their very few labor jobs will have all the money.

My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...

The artisans can create their own currency (even a digital one, call it ArtisanCoin) and only use it among themselves.

That's not really how things end up working, though; if you're living hand to mouth you end up spending all you make. If you're wealthy, you save much of your wealth.

Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.

> So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend ...

Until they get spooked and cut back discretionary spending just in case. So-called service economies are not stable.

The problem with this logic is that it assumes a zero-sum game, and a constant demand.

Example: If we have 10 guys making hydrogen cells, and all the sudden we can replace them with one robot and one guy, and that takes an unviable industry to a viable one, well then they are going to need a lot more robots and guys, a lot more than the 10 they previously had.

Except that never ended up happening. I live in a rust-belt city which was booming during most of the 1900's and ended up dying off when the 60's and 70's came around.

Today I was at lunch in what's left of our downtown district, and there were old photographs on the wall of business that used to be in the area (mostly manufacturing). I was amazed that some of the photographs showed huge rooms of women sitting at work tables assembling parts, folding boxes, and packing items.

That stuff is all gone. I could imagine a handful of machines replacing that group of people. When you go from a city having 50,000 factory workers to the 4,000 or so that we have now, it's a huge deal.

The thing about economics though is it's about the average case, not the individual case. There's always going to be winners and losers, but as long as the winners beat out the losers things work okay. I think a future dedicated towards decentralized/distributed micro-economies relying on coordination and communication would be ideal, because it could prevent exactly what your town experienced. Automation in conjunction with networking could make your town a viable manufacturing micro-hub, for example, instead of those sorts of things being shipped off to Shenzhen. I'd argue The reason china is such a power house is precisely because we don't have the automation necessary to compete with them.

The problem is that society's support system is nearly non-existent. If people have to do less work to create the same product, they should be awarded with more time away from work to enjoy their life. But without some ownership over the products of one's own labor, this is not an option. Rather than having a system where technology improves the lifestyle of the middle class, our status quo is a system where technology battles against the worker and puts her at risk of poverty.

"As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up."

That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?

It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor.

Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.

> That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?

More importantly, if we were replacing less-skilled jobs that are being automated with more-skilled, higher-paying jobs at a 1:1 ratio, automation would be driving up production costs rather than controlling them, and there'd be no motivation to do it.

I think you are confused in the same way that people are confused who think that economic pie is fixed size. The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise - and that something, whatever it is, would be useful and profitable

> The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise

No, the point -- i.e., why firms adopt automation -- is to cut the production costs of the firms adopting automation.

The hoped for social benefit -- hoped for largely by people who aren't the ones adopting automation -- is of an expanded overall economy that not only provides aggregate growth but also distributes that growth in a nice manner so that not only does the mean income improve, but the total share of population productively employed stays the same or improves, and everyone does better.

There's no real reason to expect that is either likely as the near-term result of automation, or necessary as its long-term result as a result of pure market forces. And it is certainly not the point of automation from the point of view of the firms doing the automation.

Are you actually citing another report or are you simply hoping this is true on the basis it's been true so far.

the point is that the number of jobs themselves do not dimish

I agree there. Think of the jobs that have been lost over the years as stores have closed due to competition from the internet. During my lifetime, I've seen independent bookstores merge and disappear, and even the mega-chains go away (e.g. Borders). Music stores - gone (Tower Records, Wherehouse, Sam Goody). Video rental - gone (Blockbuser). Big box electronics - going (Circuit City, Good Guys, Tweeter).

Despite all of this, unemployment stayed relatively constant, aside from the spike during the recent economic downturn (and these jobs were not lost as a result of automation).

Those are all retail jobs, so they're in the same industry. We probably have some new stores for products that didn't exist. We also have more warehouse jobs for the online merchants that replaced them.

Just thoughts, I don't know the numbers or anything.

This has been discussed on HN many many times, and I could probably just dredge up old posts and cut and paste them, but rather that re-iterate those, let me focus on the following: how would one falsify your thesis? What would it take before we could confidently agree that automation was not creating an equivalent number of jobs as it was creating?

The number of jobs do diminish. There may one day be a point where all jobs are automated. No human being will need to have a job.

I was reading about this yesterday in Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

Yes, but there are more low income Amazon warehouse jobs than mid income building cars jobs.

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