> Did the horses get new jobs when cars started taking over?
Can horses perform many of the other jobs the average Uber/truck driver is capable of?
If we're worrying about the 30% of Foxconn workers who will have lost their jobs if the company hits their automation targets and doesn't grow at all, we ought to consider that this would still leave them employing 900,000 more people than they did a couple of decades ago in the manufacture of devices whose sales were comparatively tiny two decades ago. I don't think our desire for new types of possession is fully satiated yet either.
Machines can perform a greater and greater amount of jobs which normally only were for humans because they achieve higher and higher levels of abstraction.
Most jobs doesn't require you to be a human they require you to perform a small part of what humans can do.
So whats left are things that require an entire human which makes it a commodity.
No, I'm pointing out that the pattern of machines being able to perform a greater number of jobs previously reserved for humans has been going on for two centuries and no matter what level of abstraction the machines are performing at, the result has consistently been more stuff, not fewer jobs. The real story of China's mobile phone industry isn't one of fractions of jobs being lost to efficiency programmes, it's one of there being millions of jobs created in an industry which barely existed 25 years ago. We haven't reached peak consumption yet.
And whilst "smile, pass a Turing test and do something I haven't asked you to do before" might be a very small part of what humans can do, it's something which machines in general available aren't doing a great job of catching up on. There's even a non-trivial proportion of jobs where "be a human" is the main requirement of the job. And even in the subset of tasks where computers have gone far beyond humans' capabilities they're usually better still at those tasks with a person or thousand interfacing with them, usually in jobs that didn't exist in a less technically-enabled age.
It's not just been going on it have had an actual effect on the number of new jobs created and the kinds of jobs it is (lower paid and temporary). Also the mistake many do when they talk about this is that they look at the global trend which is basically creating more jobs in the developing world and it's doing it at a cost for westerns jobs.
The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war. This is the point that many don't seem to get. Outsourcing is mostly the last step before automation.
> The number of new jobs created each decade in the US has gone down since 2nd world war
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/55/Total_private...
Trend growth looks pretty steady to me, including when typists and telephone switchboard operators were being replaced at a much faster rate than machine welders. The 2000s was obviously a terrible decade, but I'm pretty sure that has more to do with the global financial crisis than any ~2007 breakthrough in robotics
You are looking the wrong places. You are just looking at the aggregate number of jobs. But thats not relevant. What's relevant is how many new jobs are created and those numbers are going down.
Also the way jobs are defined is problematic here is how it's defined.
"People are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week. This includes all part-time and temporary work, as well as regular full-time, year-round employment. Individuals also are counted as employed if they have a job at which they did not work during the survey week, whether they were paid or not, because they were:
On vacation
Ill
Experiencing child care problems
On maternity or paternity leave
Taking care of some other family or personal obligation
Involved in a labor dispute
Prevented from working by bad weather
These people are counted among the employed and tabulated separately as with a job but not at work, because they have a specific job to which they will return."
Can horses perform many of the other jobs the average Uber/truck driver is capable of?
If we're worrying about the 30% of Foxconn workers who will have lost their jobs if the company hits their automation targets and doesn't grow at all, we ought to consider that this would still leave them employing 900,000 more people than they did a couple of decades ago in the manufacture of devices whose sales were comparatively tiny two decades ago. I don't think our desire for new types of possession is fully satiated yet either.