Technology enables us to work smarter, do more, at a higher level that was never dreamed possible than before. There are always bumps in the road and always those who moan that this is the end of jobs for everyone. In one generation it’s fast food machines replacing burger flippers, in an older one it was tractors replacing horses, and I suspect if you go back far enough, someone worried that the wheel would eliminate the motive to go capture slaves to do the toting and lifting...
And anyone who thinks they can stand in the way of progress should try going to the beach and holding back the tide. They are equally impossible.
But in this case it is not quite the same, as others have pointed out, there could be attempts to have robots, connected through human supervisors, replace humans in all blue collar working jobs, in management and business positions, in teaching jobs, construction, nursing, salesmanship,engineering and that is just in the near future. Which again, could mean we now have many tens of millions of Americans who have spent their lives learning specific trades that are obsolete and therefore have become wholly unemployable.
But back then, people were much more capable of building a functioning economy that America is today. Therefore, any jobs being replaced by machines cannot really be considered a good thing.
To which all the slaves said, “Amen”.
The farm machines also replaced the people. You don’t see many people working on farms anymore.
There are millions of jobs that go unfilled because the blue collar skill set hasn’t been taught to this generation. The top vocational schools in Chicago have all become college prep. More misallocation by central planners. At some point we have to wake up to the fact that though planning works for individuals it only works so well. No plan survives contact with reality. Central planning can never work.
Instead of teaching about global warming and rainforest preservation kids should have been reading Hayek. We’d be there already if they did.
Smart people will do fine...it’s the stupid people I worry about, and time was there were enough jobs for stupid people to do. Those are the jobs that are going away.
Idle hands are the Devil’s Playground.