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Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

I don't think printing is a good example, there were not that many scribes around who were suddenly put out of work.

How about the Combine Harvester?

This talk about technology taking jobs from people is utter nonsense. This has happened before - the Industrialization. People are freed from unnecessary chores like harvesting or standing at the cashier, for example. Soon enough new types of jobs were in high demand - mathematicians, engineers, professors. This enabled further development in other professions - more doctors, teachers, historians, etc.

Same thing will happen now. Just look at the education landscape. Data science is taught EVERYWHERE.

Industrilization made humanity able to focus on exact sciences. The advancement in exact sciences will enable us to focus on social studies, philosophy, history, ecology, medicine, law, system design.

Not everyone is happy with an intellectual job.

It's not only about intellectual jobs; it's also about more powerful abstractions. With the same resources spent on the same amount of workers for example, a company will produce more than in the past. It's not necessarily true that in such conditions, the company would choose to keep the productivity constant employing less workers.

One big issue that people tend to miss when comparing current situation to the previous years is the fact that machines are making more machines. See, when combine harvester or loom was invented people were needed to build these machines, so it was fairly easy to move them from doing one manual job to another. Right now however, that one machine can be build by another machine.

When I recently helped build a machine to automate some test processes at a local company it took us about 120 hours in total to do it. The machine will replace three people. All of the components that were used were either computers, software or electronics. This is not something that any of these employees will be ever able to do, as they are simply a very low skilled, uneducated workers, from impoverished neighborhood. The next machine that we may be building for this company will take us even less time, as we have everything already designed, and tested. We just need to put few components together and verify that it works. It will maybe take us 16 hours to do it.

When it takes you less than a week of work to replace three people, there is no way that the jobs for these employees can be created fast enough.

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