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FloorEggyesterday at 7:58 PM4 repliesview on HN

This transition does too. It's just not clear to most where yet.


Replies

Epa095yesterday at 8:19 PM

He talked about exactly this in the article

  The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
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koalamanyesterday at 8:09 PM

Is it a secret you can't share with us?

I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.

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rglullisyesterday at 8:19 PM

There is no guarantee that this transition will lead to any type of desirable or meaningful job.

Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.

It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.

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forgetfreemanyesterday at 8:08 PM

It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.