Trains also took away long distance horse buggie jobs. They were largely automated too. And finally, if you think driverless cars are nearby, then so are completely humanoid robots who can do all the work a human can do.
You seem to be arguing that the issues I brought up are tied only to globalization and outsourcing when they are, in fact, tied to underlying economics that strongly favors automation in the long run. Over the next 10-20 years as automation becomes cheaper and more practical, it makes sense that the same problems will accelerate, even as globalization and outsourcing decline.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/08/news/companies/carrier-jobs...
Automation is global reduction of available jobs, which we might be doing (with agricultural mechanization mostly). But nowhere are we close to a mass change in society worldwide, not due to AI, and specially not to be given the blame of rising inequality, wages, debt, and unemployment.
Actually, I can agree that there had been reduction in global jobs as world gets slowly automated. But there won't be a sudden takeover of all jobs by some super sentient AI leading to mass unemployment. And neither are the current problems of inequality, debt, low wages a result of an increasing productivity, but rather increasing globalization.
No shit. There's fewer typewriters these days too.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKCAMP1960...
John F Kennedy talking about how automation is going to change America in 1960.
I find smarter people tend to broadly overestimate human potential. We are unreliable, tire, are often untrustworthy, make mistakes, are subject to emotions, prone to illogic and irrationality, etc. We're a very suboptimal entropy-reducing machine relative to the forms of purpose-built AI and robotics that will be possible within the next 20 years. It's a shame people aren't more alarmed about this.
There is actually some evidence that what we currently have is already worse than serfdom [0] in many ways. I don't think this is a crisis which is about to occur, but one which has already started, is currently ongoing, and will probably get much worse.
[0] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
As for self driving trucks, I remember people telling me a decade ago that they would have lead to mass unemployment by now. The predictions of an impending automation crisis haven't had a great track record.
As for self driving trucks, who told you that? Per my prior comment, we're not there yet, but it is definitely coming. Automation hasn't reached driving yet and it won't in any significant way for at least another 5 years, but as soon as the tech is ready, adoption is going to be rapid. But saying "it hasn't happened yet, so clearly it's bogus" is like building a cabin on an active volcano and saying, "they said it would erupt within the last 5 years and that didn't happen, so clearly it's not going to erupt ever". Just because a predicted timeline is incorrect does not mean the predicted event won't come to pass.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/3/28/15094424/jobs-eliminated-ne...
[2] http://evonomics.com/productivity-is-slowing-inequality-is-g...
Betting on widespread automation of trucking is probably one of the safest AI-related bets you could make right now.
This looks much more like the real problem to me. The solution: Make it much easier and less bureaucratic for such people to invest their money.
1) As has been shown time and time again, the rewards of productivity gains accrue to the owners of capital far more than to the workers who are more productive. The result is widening inequality on many levels, which extrapolated a few decades into the future ends up looking... not great. I hope we can agree that de facto serfdom is a bad thing.
2) You can't just look at the number of new jobs when making employment generalizations - you have to look at the quality and type of jobs that were created to replace the ones lost. It's like if you took away someone's house and then gave them a tiny apartment a year later, then claimed "Look, they got housing back! Everything's great again!". In the case of employment, the vast majority of jobs created in the last decade have been contract positions and low-end temp work [1]. If you look at the sectors where employment has grown when new jobs data comes out, low-end service jobs continuously top the list (ex. [2]). We can debate whether or not people actually want these types of new jobs as opposed to traditional real estate/financial services/salaried construction/etc. jobs that were lost in 2009-2010.
3) We haven't hit the automation crisis yet in any meaningful way. When autonomous trucks and warehouse robots become prevalent, then we will be in an actual crisis.
The automation crisis right now is not that everyone is going to lose their jobs overnight, but that automation is exacerbating big problems in the jobs market that lead to massive inequality, the prevalence of underemployment, and the trend towards bad jobs with few or no benefits and workers needing to work gigs on the side to make ends meet or afford the things that their normal job would have provided in decades past. When large swathes of workers lose their jobs to automation in the future, these problems are going to continue to compound unless we start making big policy changes. Yes, people will likely find new jobs to replace the ones lost, but will they actually be better or worse off than before?
[1] https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/f...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/business/economy/services...