Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by prodmerc on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:20AM (#10078369)

Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to. In 1900 people were still settling in America, and production has grown immensely worldwide at a steady rate since then, while population was relatively low.

Now, population has grown three fold in the last hundred years: http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...

There are more old people alive than ever before as a percentage of the overall population (I guess there's jobs in caring for them, unless robots do that, as well), and technology is at a point where it can replace humans completely, instead of working side by side.

I always say, the Industrial Revolution = humans aided by machines (say a ratio of 1-100), the Automation Revolution = machines aided by humans (take the same ratio in reverse).

You see the problem? Population is exploding, job automation is doing the same. In a society that needs to work in order to live, that is unsustainable.

I'm all for automation, but we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money...

The people who own and maintain the machines will be fine, those who mediate relations between humans-humans-machines, as well. What about the rest?

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by toyg on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:54AM (#10078481)

> Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to.

There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.

> we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money...

We need to rethink how money is created and distributed. Once you do that, the need to "make money" might be lessened or replaced with different ones.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by pixl97 on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @03:17PM (#10081486)

>There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.

You might want to re-think that. Places where people do not live are generally like that for a reason. How much fresh water is there? Do we really want to have more places on the planet under water stress? Do we want to ship water there? Is it hot as hell there? How much of a persons income is needed to survive with modern conveniences? What is the carbon cost of living there?

>We need to rethink how money is created and distributed.

That has to happen, but will it happen? For example, after the horse was replaced by the car, did we keep millions of horses around? No, there numbers dropped significantly. If technology can truly replace huge numbers of people, the people left with the capital may think that getting rid of huge portions of the population is a valid outcome. The truly scary thing is it may actually be a valid answer.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by prodmerc on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @11:26AM (#10079679)

Africa, yeah, probably the last continent that has huge potential. But won't they just skip the people and go straight to automation? Like how developing countries have the newest Internet infrastructure because it was a no brainer to install the latest generation (rather than upgrade the old stuff).

Rethinking income/money is definitely a must, but right now we're totally dependent on it...

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by blumkvist on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:52AM (#10078475)

There are plenty of jobs that cannot and will never be able to be automated. Like a kindergarten teacher. Coincidentally (or not so much) those are the jobs that improve society and life the most.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @07:53AM (#10078681)

We will never need that many kindergarten teachers. Ultimately we'll face near 100% unemployment, or as they called it in the 1950, utopia. Why do we resist?

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by prodmerc on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @11:28AM (#10079695)

You can have only so many teachers before the market is oversaturated. And I think quite a few people will prefer home schooling via online courses.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by blumkvist on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @11:44AM (#10079798)

One teacher per 5 kids seems reasonable to me and will more than quadruple the kindergarten teachers. Homeschooling is a terrible idea as is, but more pedagogues will completely remove any logical reasons to even consider it.

But why do you latch to the specific job i picked? More ecologists, more physicians, more nurses, more psychologists, more people in the creative industries. More people in the "caring" industries as a whole. Workforce shifted from labor to knowledge. It will now shift to societal work.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @11:55AM (#10079864)

But...why? Why make up 'societal work', to keep people busy? Is it such a bad idea that folks should be able to choose their own lives, doing their own thing?

For instance, I might never want to become a touchy-feely creative-industry person. What is there in this planned society for me?

The trouble with this discussion is, that it starts assuming everybody must have a job. I disagree; that's the old pre-abundance view of the world. We have to get past that.

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Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s... by blumkvist on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @02:16PM (#10081050)

It is not made up work. Ultimately our job is to maintain a healthy eco system. This includes building a society that knows better than greed and decadence. Raising children who do not perceive themselves as rulers of the world.

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