If robots and AI are eliminating an entire sector (starting with driving for instance), what other manual or low skill jobs are there that aren't already targeted for AI replacement? We don't need 2m more car mechanics or farm workers. This time it seem likely a certain class of job is going away.

Half the population is below average intelligence, and perhaps 25% (total guess) might be best suited to a manual or semi-skilled role. What are we going to do with them?

When similar things have happened previously, the once semi-skilled (eg) shipbuilder becomes a low wage driver or call centre worker. Many in an area didn't get those few roles, so became unemployed (and often depressed) for the rest of their careers. Some steel or shipbuilding towns haven't fully recovered even today.

Longer ago the farmhand could get any number of manual roles in the growing industries. Blacksmiths became car mechanics, fuel attendants and so on.

Also when it's only a number of regional cities affected, like with coal, steel or shipbuilding, it's much easier politically than when it's national.

Relatively low margin, fragmented service jobs. Waiters/waitresses, fitness instructors, barbers etc. Those jobs are often still better than the jobs being automated away (truck driving), just less economic to build such specialty robots, at least in the near term.

Except none of those types of jobs offer the stability of the original industrial jobs, and are generally geared more toward younger workers, who have longer. So it's a much worse situation for those workers as the jobs are higher risk.

If you were a 55 year old long haul trucker, you aren't going to be able to replace the income/benefits you had with a $7/hr (pre-tip) service sector job.

>$7/hr (pre-tip)

waitstaff isnt paid that much hourly. Its generally on the order of 2-3$ per hour.

edit: since im being downvoted i assume someone disagrees - here is a source:

from nolo.com:

>Employers must pay tipped employees at least $3.23 an hour in 2016, $3.38 an hour in 2017, and $3.52 an hour in 2018.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/michigan-laws-tipped-...

Confused Brit question - how? That's below min wage, which I thought was national law. I imagine it's a bit lower for youngsters.

> Under federal law and in most states, employers may pay tipped employees less than the minimum wage, as long as employees earn enough in tips to make up the difference. This is called a "tip credit."

Technically you can sue your employer if they wont pay you the difference if you dont end up making enough in tips to end up at or above minimum wage - in practice however, suing your employer is generally not a great way to stay employed

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/michigan-laws-tipped-...

Damn, that's harsh.

Only way I know round UK min wage is to be self-employed, or one of the fake "self-employed" like some delivery drivers have had to become. Surprised the IR haven't slammed the door on that little scam yet.

Wait staff have their own minimum wages. Iirc it's under $3/hour.

That said, it's not uncommon to get at least minimum wage.

7 is an average - as some states have a minimum up to $10/hr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...

Many service sector jobs are not minimum wage and not geared towards young people (any more than truck driving). They do often have utilization issues, but so do truck drivers. Generally that's probably more of an argument for those folks to organize themselves than anything else. Truck drivers certainly did (The Teamsters).

> Relatively low margin, fragmented service jobs. Waiters/waitresses, fitness instructors, barbers etc. Those jobs are often still better than the jobs being automated away (truck driving)

No, they aren't. Many "low-margin, framented service jobs" of the type you list are often effectively sub-minimum wage (possible because they are usually independent sole proprietorships renting facilities from the entity that looks like their "employer") highly-saturated already, increasing the proportion of the population trying to work them will further crash wages.

Aren't most of those already down at min wage? At least a proportion of waiting jobs will be going away too.

Can they absorb another 10m (or however many there are) truck and van drivers who probably made quite a bit more? I know it won't be overnight, but it seems to be rapidly becoming a political rather than economic question.

Like must we learn to run at 20-25% unemployment instead of <10? We'd probably have to learn to stop viewing them as scroungers too and adjust welfare somewhat.

Many are, but not all. And I suspect waiting jobs as ratio compared with eating out gross revenue is shrinking (though eating out is growing and is more labor intensive than a grocery store still). Part of that is labor organization, the truckers have unions. And unions were (and are) a big political issue.

so in the face of massive layoffs of entire sectors of the economy - you are suggesting that restaurants will be hiring /more/ people?

Who is eating at these restaurants that wasnt before? Why would they suddenly be hiring millions of people at restaurants?

Who is suddenly attending more fitness classes now that there is massive unemployment, to the extent that we need millions more fitness instructors?

Your suggestions dont make any sense whatsoever. If you had said Campbells soup company would be hiring you might be on to something, but in the face of millions losing jobs, luxuries like restaurants, fitness classes, etc certainly wont be seeing massive growth in demand....

>Half the population is below average intelligence

Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, which I guess is a commonly accepted thing :-D

It's not that it won't correct, it's that the correction offers no guarantee of being humane.

In the 20th century, the population of horses (in the US) started declining rapidly, from a high of over 20 million in 1920 to under 5 million in 1960. Industry decided the horse was unnecessary after thousands of years of history, thus they were slaughtered in short order.

The only difference between me and a horse from the market's view is that I do different jobs and consume human goods. To the extent that I am necessary it is because the market will need someone to move goods and services to, but left to its own devices it might well decide to sell weapons that I get killed with. Markets are honest, not smart.

Citation on horse slaughtering in the mid-1900s that probably was relatively unrelated to the Great Depressions? Legitimately interested.

I don't have a detailed source on hand for the slaughtering operations specifically, but this is a good overview article of where the meat went:

https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/

Just to be clear for everyone who doesn't click through. The car was one (and seemingly a very small one) amongst many reasons people ate horses, coupled with varying economic recessions, shortages of other meat, and changing consumer taste.

Yeah, over 40 years it would be easy to reduce the number of horses simply by attrition.

> What I don't get is how what is happening now is fundamentally different to the point where the economy won't correct?

Used to be, worse came to worst, you'd just go be a hired hand for someone: a farmhand, a servant, a soldier, a sailor, etc. It also used to be that four walls and a roof was a home and bread and what-you-can-grow was food. Our standards of living are different now, at least in developed nations. We also had social structures that included multi-generational communities. So the grandparents, older relatives, etc. would watch the children, help around the house, etc.

Also, people ate worse, got sick more, and died younger.

But haven't those other corrections been somewhat painful for many people? I think the fear here is that this is so much larger because instead of letting one person do the work of 10, leaving the other 9 to do something new, this is just replacing all 10 across numerous classes of work, leaving few to no new jobs. It's going to be a lot more painful for a lot more people than previous corrections. It could result in violence, starvation, and the collapse of the middle class, leaving the have-not's entirely at the mercy of the haves with no recourse to get out of that situation.

Well, if it takes some time for workers to shift sectors and if "creatively destructive" technological innovation on the other hand happens to accelerate, it's conceivable that at a certain point, the absolute majority of workers will be redundant. There won't be an equilibrium, because the workers are trying to chase an accelerating point while moving at a constant velocity.

There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Just like population growth until 1800s, or economic growth until the 1820s. Those two were pretty much linear and not very different from zero until they weren't.

I don't actually subscribe to this rationale, though. I'm just putting it out like this because it's pretty much what everybody says and I recognize that it's quite plausible, given the two first hypotheses.

> There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process.

Most processes involving people (and lots of others, besides) that look exponential at some point are really logistic, so even in that case, there's probably some equilibrium point somewhere in the future, though its possible that its many generations down the line from the point where the appearance of exponential change first occurs.

Good point. It's quite possible that there's a fundamental limit to technological achievement and that we just haven't reached it yet.

On the other hand, I'd like to say that it's also possible that some particular processes can follow exponential laws without any restriction. It might be somewhat hazy, but what if outside of a few measures (infant mortality, life expectancy, etc) economic progress is nothing more than a subjective measurement of how present consumers value past output?

I'm not saying anything new here, both Easterlin's paradox and the idea of a "hedonic treadmill" support the idea that more income doesn't necessarily equate into increased happiness. And specially in the case of economic innovation, which might not actually be technically interesting or require any "new physics" at all - just mashing some current technologies into a marketable product - it might never ever stop, and will just degenerate into an endless chase of ever changing fads. Past economies wouldn't be particular poor, just particularly quaint, and a repository of dead fads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox

It's very far from idle speculation at this point; many prominent economists and economic researchers[1] have grappled with the issue. Both the Lump of Labor Fallacy and Luddite Fallacy may prove themselves to be fallacious in the new era. Gwern has a good post with links:

http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...

Here are a few prominent ones:

http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-g... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=... http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-a...

[1] Autor, Ford, Cowen, Krugman, Acemoglu, Brynjolfsson, McAfee just to name a few

I think some of these are good insights. There is no question that society will change a lot over this century, I'll be curious to see if it changes in a way that anyone predicted.

I could give you my take but I think CGP Grey really explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Could you explain what you mean by "the economy", and how it is of importance that it has "balanced out" ?

I mean, one could probably say that the economy has balanced out after the great depression, after WW2, after the 2008 crisis, and so on. Many people did not.

Really? AI-assisted automation has happened in the past?

If so, I missed that portion in my history classes.

Much worse! Completely, strategically dominant replacement of human and animal muscle with the steam engine.

Yet, without brains.

Still, arguably, a very primitive form of "artificial intelligence."

CGPGrey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video addresses precisely that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

EDIT: Bah. Too late.

Hehe I think you might have actually been first!

>I'm not an economist but every other time similar things have happened in industry the economy has balanced out.

"The economy" did not "balance out". "The economy" is not an active agent. The economy was politically managed -- for instance, via the Fed's original mandate to encourage full employment. What prevents similar management taking place today is ideological opposition to it.

The Fed adding improving employment to natural zero to it's mandate post Great Recession alongside controlling inflation, seems to imply that the ideological opposition isn't that strong.