I tend to doubt that truckers will turn into programmers. If anything programming is going to continue to be more about burning out college grads, and it'll be difficult for 40 year old established programmers to find work, much less 40 year old retrained truckers--even at half the cost.

At any rate, that would be the optimistic viewpoint, that they could actually get retrained and get jobs and compete for wages. What is likely to happen is that they'll have extreme difficulty finding any work, the income gaps will widen and there'll be even more disaffected workers.

> programming is going to continue to be more about burning out college grads

This is the product of a particular culture that goes back to how the places currently employing the most programmers are currently funded. When the bubble bursts, the macho candle-at-both-ends death march bullshit will give way to professionalism.

There also will probably be a glut of programmers by then so it doesn't help the hypothetical retrained truckers.

I mean programming was just an example for us here. I think some will go for programming, but certainly not all. They're going to be competing for every job they can get. There's going to be increased pressure on every job opening everywhere. People are going to be competing against way more candidates. And that is going to drive those wages down even more.

The safest jobs, at least for another 20-30 years, will be things like doctors, where you can't just retrain to do it. If you didn't start right out of high school in college, you're not getting that job.

> Which they will be, because they'll be desperate to feed their families.

This is one of the things we'll need to solve. Nobody should be desperate to feed their families. If someone still is, it's because our civilization still gets a failing grade.

Very much indeed. What I'm not sure is understood in these jobs calculations is that there is always a domino effect. The paper mill closes down one of their machines. This lays off 100 people. All the truckers that supplied wood for that machine also lose their jobs. There's another 25 jobs. All the logging contractors that supplied that machine have to either find other contracts or lose their jobs. There's another 25 jobs. The businesses that supplied parts and repairs for the loggers, the truckers, and the mills, lose that business. There goes some more jobs. The sandwich shops, gas stations, restaurants and everything else in the community takes the hit because of the hundreds of other people that have now lost their jobs, and some of those people lose their jobs. People leave the area. School districts downsize, the road departments and the police forces and the hospitals downsize because the population has shrunk.

It's a vicious circle.

We'll find new works. In the 1800s ~70% of the workers were employed in agriculture. Someone noticing the progress of technology would have predicted just like you. (In fact Keynes did make a similar prediction.) It didn't come true because they failed to see the evolution of new jobs like programmer, animation designer, cinematographer etc. Why this time is different?

The first wave of automation covered the use of our muscles, so jobs migrated to work that required the brain. Now that the brain's being automated, what do we have left to fall back on?

Our looks.

Two things could make this different, depending on exactly what the prediction was.

One would be that, in the 1800s, they would have been predicting _fewer_ entry-level jobs in a given field (e.g. replacing bunches of manual workers with machinery to allow one person to do the work), not _no_ entry-level jobs in said field.

The other difference, here, is that the job shift you're discussing (except, arguably, for "programmer") is into jobs which require prior training to have any likelihood of getting a position.

One additional problem - even assuming that new entry-level positions in other industries existed, that's going to be a huge loss of income for the families affected, and anything that causes that drastic a reduction of income across any significant population of people is going to have huge ripple effects.