People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated.

What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that.

Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.

Take Moore's law for example. The doubling of transistors/halving of their expense first allowed more efficient computation in the original manner, but now that qualitative change has started to alter the very nature of computation- omnipresent computation in all man made devices doesn't mean our spreadsheets run faster, but rather humanity exchanges information and communicates in an entirely different manner than it did a generation ago.

Likewise, I believe we'll see the gradual automation of 'useless' jobs change from an event we can work around by retraining or switching careers to an obsolescence of the vast majority of human labor. There are some nagging statistics about unemployed engineers that I believe back my assumption, especially considering that engineering positions should be the new careers people retrain to.

If the maximum work complexity a person can handle is assembling hamburgers, washing dishes, moping floors, sticking one part onto another part then they are in danger of being permanently displaced by robots from ALL job categories.

I don't know how many people this is but as robots improve this number grows. How large would this number have to be, when added to current chronic levels of high unemployment, disability, nonproductive elderly/young, before society breaks down. And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing? The mind rapidly slides into what we have previously considered dystopian science fiction.

Starving?

well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.

here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad.

Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm

What? No - not nitpick. You cherrypicked words to exclude the writer's caveat, changing the meaning, then criticised the changed meaning. Classic out-of-context quoting, especially since the writer addressed your criticism in the very same sentence you quoted.

That's the whole reason for needing drastic social changes, to figure out how to distribute resources when the raw labor of many or most of population isn't useful anymore, when paying a bare sustenance wage is more expensive than simply getting a machine to do the same thing better and faster.

Robots already can partially or fully replace diagnosticians and surgeons. Those are jobs that takes one or two decade to specialize in.

Oh, wait.

All that said, there may be a new class of unemployable people that will need to be accounted for in some way. Not sure what that is yet. I can say that I find it unfathomable that government will work on the problem prior to it becoming an issue.

In the past we've mostly been replacing a few skilled workers with lots of unskilled ones. Automation does the opposite.

And if this is possible, can people be freed to do something more useful if there is nothing more useful?

Think back to the Horse & Buggy days, when cars came along, I'm sure people were saying "with all these cars not needing horses, all those people that care for and breed horses will be out of work", but look at all the jobs that were created, and particularly the jobs you're now concerned have been lost in Detroit.

I think Detroit may be a bit of a special case as the population boom there was driven by the growth of the Automotive industry at a time when everything needed to be centralised. Almost everything was decentralised before (with the majority of jobs being in Agriculture I believe), so we had a short period of history with mass centralisation and we are now able to decentralise again, so the places that amassed workers geographically look so much worse off by comparison, while going through massive change.

Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.

If you look at history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs - to lower paying jobs. The destruction of America's middle class should be a testament to that. People think that their middle-class salary factory jobs all moved to China, but in reality most were simply automated.

Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.

Unemployment has fluctuated dramatically over the last century as a percentage between nearly zero percent in WW2 to over 20% during the Great Depression.

I've heard that said in different ways in different places over the years. But is it a iron law of nature, or just a thing that goes on until it doesn't?

If it will eventually stop (and I think this is likely), how would you tell when it is going to stop? Would you notice if it is already happening?

Would there be a weird "jobless recovery" after economic troubles or something?

Would the factory owners as class increasingly be doing better and better, but factory employees doing worse and worse?

Is there really a historical precedent for automating the whole manufacturing process, from robotic mining machines to automated factories to delivery drones?

What happens when the car factory doesn't need workers. Who buys the cars?

Anyway, at all the examples of automation you'll find in history, you'll see lots and lots of people losing their job and starving to death because of them (more people the more prevalent is the change). At the long term, society gets into an equilibrium, at the short term, things are quite dark.

That's some very unimaginative thinking there. Large scale industrial automation is a Good Thing for humanity.

This means that a significant proportition of humans can't simply remain competitve. And that proportition is growing year by year. Ultimately the machine beats the man. The social politics around the world need to be adjusted for this rather sooner than later.

Unemployment could be solved tomorrow if we banned large trucks and mandated all goods be transported in little 3wheel delivery vans like they have in little Italian towns. But that would be bad for society as the price of everything skyrocketed to cover the inefficient delivery. Or we could tear down power stations and make people carry buckets of water up a hill to run a hydro electric plant. These are absurd scenarios yet illustrate the reverse of the problem.

Technology happens, and it is generally good for humanity. Only a pessimist can looks at the enormous progress made in productivity through automation, and then confidently declare that from this point forwards, things can only get worse.

Entirely new businesses requiring lots of people are yet to be created. Detroit didn't happen 'just at the right time', Detroit happened precisely because it could - labor was freed up from producing the food supply, and disposable income increased because the cost of food dropped through automation.

It might be uncomfortable - change always is - but the alternatives are horrifying, like regulating new tech away and forcing people to keep those jobs. I for one never want someone metaphorically carrying a bucket of water up a hill for me so I can feel superior about makign sure they are still employed.

I'm sorry, but where did this increased purchasing power come from? The people who traded their middle class job for slinging burgers? The purchasing power of the vast majority in the US has gone down over the last 60 years.

I'm not against automation. It is inevitable. But let's not pretend like it is just as inevitable that everything will work itself out.

The only concrete thing mentioned is that it might be time to re-evaluate social policies. Which honestly makes a LOT of sense.

Only someone who can't think outside of the current social framework would assume that means we try to lock things down the way they are.

Lets think about some other possibilities:

-Free basic housing (would go a long way towards giving impoverished people the flexibility to move where they need to be to work whatever new jobs pop up)

-Pay people to exercise (yes, I'm serious, we could reduce healthcare costs and several studies show that people who exercise regularly perform better in mental tasks. The same tasks that are likely to become more in demand)

-Provide a basic income (Enough money to allow single parents to reliably put food on the table for their kids and buy simple modest luxuries. This still allows those who want more to climb the social ladder, but doesn't completely screw those who by nature or circumstance are not as equipped to do so)

-Invest heavily in community centers and activities (people are considerably less likely to suffer depression if they attend more community events. Active participation in the community makes democracy more effective)

-Any number of other ideas that challenge our current pre-conceptions of how we should run our society.

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"Only a pessimist can looks at the enormous progress made in productivity through automation, and then confidently declare that from this point forwards, things can only get worse"

This is true, in general technological advances have benefited society, but unequal wealth distribution has almost always hurt it.

Right now automation and capitalization allow those with the resources to become more and more wealthy, and those without resources are increasingly unable to get a foot in the door. Technology isn't the problem, unequal wealth IS. The obvious answer to this is a change in social policy. But like you said: "It might be uncomfortable - change always is".

This will only be true when we're nearing singularity, and that IMHO won't happen for centuries yet. So there's still time to go.

Automation does reduce the human labor content in the goods we purchase, but at the same time, it reduces the cost of those goods so that more units are sold and more people can afford them. Less human labor per item, but many more items.

The fact that Michigan industry died, is pretty much political. Tech changes helped a little, but in the end, it was all political. I am talking about grants and tax incentives and what not that happens behind closed doors in exchange for campaign support.

The new jobs will be found in entirely new markets and fed by free education.