Fun story, the word luddite comes from Ned Ludd, an 18th century English weaver. He destroyed some mechanical looms and inspired a bunch of people to copy him. They were angry about automation taking their jobs.
This is a timeless problem.
> Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train.
You're gonna need more empathy than that. For someone like a 50-year-old coal miner living in Kentucky, "adapt, retrain" is easier said than done.
For self-driving vehicles, I suspect the window of time between "commercially viable" and "common" is a few years, ten if we want to be pessimistic.
So will society (jobs, infrastructure, etc) adjust quickly enough to absorb this change without major pain?
I don't know but since we know it's going to happen, I think we should push the conversation towards "what's next" and figure out how to help people get there instead of just lamenting the loss or complaining about the lament.
If a 35-year old coal miner has bought a house with a middle-class income and suddenly gets laid off, he could be in that shelter within a year. That is why people are so concerned with holding on to jobs.
Automation eventually leads to a rise in productivity and living standards for future generations. The typical truck driver won't get to reap any of the benefits from the transition.
Sympathy for the Luddites[1] lays out a convincing argument for what actually happens when these jobs disappear.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-f...
I used to make this argument, but I don't really agree with it anymore. In the past, there was significantly more on-the-job training and even people with a high school education could get fairly good jobs with the possibility of meaningful career advancement. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and it seems like most of the jobs that are lost due to free trade and automation result in workers that, at best, have primarily service jobs available to them that offer little possibility for advancement. Economists predicted that those displaced workers would increase their educational level and retrain, but in practice that did not happen either because people are unable or unwilling. At least part of this must be because in the past, on-the-job training was much more common than today.
See this article in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21695855-america...
Here are some relevant paragraphs: Until recently, most economists assumed that displaced workers could find new work relatively easily. After all, in June 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, unemployment was 4.6%—lower than it was before the recession of the early 1990s. Between 2000 and 2007 Americans left 5m jobs a month and started 5.1m new ones. A million or so jobs lost to trade with China over more than a decade seems tiny by comparison.
But many workers displaced by Chinese imports did not simply find another job. Mr Autor and his colleagues have shown that, at local level, employment falls at least one-for-one with jobs lost to trade, and that displaced workers are unlikely to move to seek new work. The lowest-skilled who do find new jobs tend to move to similar, and thus similarly vulnerable, employment. One reason for this immobility could be that the economy is now an unwelcoming place for jobseekers without a university degree. The housing collapse of the late 2000s, which left many Americans trapped in negative equity, may have made things worse. This new strain of research has lent support to the claim of Dani Rodrik, a globalisation sceptic, that “If you are of low skill, have little education, and are not very mobile, international trade has been bad news for you pretty much throughout your entire life.”
While that article is focused on trade, automation should have a similar impact on the kinds of jobs displaced, e.g., level of education and skill required.
It shouldn't be a matter of holding on to the jobs, it should be about helping people transition to new jobs.
The industrial revolution was amazing and wonderful, but for the people who get caught under the wheels, who didn't know how to adapt, it was nothing but pain.
Here is a poem to illustrate what I mean: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai...
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19271
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
I guess lots of the 120,000 work at smaller gas plants.
There's ~1.6 million people directly employed as truck drivers.
When the automobile was invented think of all the farriers and hay people that went out of business and had to move on.
Think about the milkman or the guy that used to put ice in the back of your ice-chest out in the back yard.
When we eventually move off coal, think of all the millions of people involved in the coal industry that will be out of work.
Those lay-offs are a good thing, and we should be doing everything we can do expedite the process.
Of course for individuals in an industry that will be soon redundant it sucks, but that's the nature of life. Move on, adapt, re-train. Job security was fleeting in the 70s and 80s. It's not real anymore.