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Re:Jobs that no longer exist by lisper on Saturday October 15, 2016 @11:28AM (#12714300)
That's true, but that should not lull us into complacency. Some day we may run out of productive things for unskilled human labor to do, the same way we ran out of things for horses to do (http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply). Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.
Re:Jobs that no longer exist by ekianjo on Saturday October 15, 2016 @11:31AM (#12714311)
Yes, but that also means humans are usually more resourceful than what we can imagine in the first place. Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth, and look where we are now: virtually no famines anywhere (except in war zones and in the worst dictatorships, which is now a minority) and the population is still growing and poverty is decreasing progressively. This would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.

So, let's not fool ourselves with predictions. We are notoriously bad a predicting long term trends.

PS: the analogy with horse is wrong in so many ways (because horses are not humans and cannot adapt like humans) but this would be another topic altogether.

Re:Jobs that no longer exist by lisper on Saturday October 15, 2016 @01:27PM (#12714822)
Humans as a species are pretty resourceful, but individual humans often not so much.

The problem is that throughout human history the demand for unskilled labor has exceeded the supply, and that has been the foundation of our social contract: work, and you eat. Don't, and you starve. But some day soon, technology could make that assumption no longer true, at which point we could have big problems unless we radically rethink how our society is organized. That is something we humans have historically not been very good at.

Re:Jobs that no longer exist by etqwzutewzu on Sunday October 16, 2016 @09:37AM (#12718532)

  Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth"
"It is estimated that the population of the world reached one billion for the first time in 1804." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_milestone_babies
Re:Jobs that no longer exist by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday October 20, 2016 @07:01AM (#12751262)
>> Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.

If we all put our backs into it, we can make sure that we need at least that many.

We just have to write really bad documentation and really sloppy code, which lot of people believe we are doing already.

With a bit of effort maintaining the software being written today will become such a monumental task that no Soft Eng will ever be out of work for millenia to come.