Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point.
Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...
and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer?
The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so).
The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.
looks around
Certainly seems that way.
How many tribes, peoples, and nations no longer exist because they had a less efficient means of production than their neighbors?
Fun fact: hunter-gatherer lifestyles require far less work to maintain self-sufficiency than agricultural lifestyles. In fact, it wasn't until around 1900 or so that agricultural societies caught up to hunter-gatherer societies in metrics such as life expectancy and general health welfare.
Note that as population densities rise, land becomes a bottleneck for a population more than number of available hours.
Critically, the work was done by fewer humans (per unit of caloric energy). This allowed other people to specialize in other ways that provided value to the farmers.
Whoever specializes to automate doesn’t care about the craft or quality as much as quantity. We’re in a better place now, luckily nobody goes barefoot these days, but I wish there was a solution where craftsmen could continue doing their art and craft the way they are used to without being pushed out by automation. I wonder if a compromise could be reached to meet that halfway such that automation becomes merely a tool in the hands of craftsmen, a solution where man is still at the center of his game and uses tools to enhance their game.
But the general consensus is that everything will be eventually automated away and the only things left for people to do is entertain eachother or something to this tendency.
This is not a personal dig, but you clearly did not brush with the real world. There are a lot of smart people out there that through no fault of their own couldn't go to collage, but there are others that would not get far anywhere...
That's just how the cruel distribution mistress works.
Try and start a farm now, you can't compete without serious investment.
The high tech farms will send their overabundant produce 2000 miles and still undercut you, while profiting.
It's impressive, really, but it does put many local farms and would be farmers (lots of land, no other skills/ideas) out of a job.
In 50-100 years there won't be much to automate. Drone delivery will happen soon unless the drones kill a ton of people. Same with driverless trucks. Uber might go under first but someone will figure it out. Between service jobs, warehouse jobs, unskilled manufacturing jobs, and driving jobs there's going to be tens of millions of jobs lost with virtually nothing to replace them. As jobs are made simpler by machines the value added by the machine goes entirely to the machines owner. This is a net loss for society and a net loss for the economy.
100 years ago, just sending this message to everyone of you who reads this would have taken countless man hours. Think of the paper that needs to be made, the trees fell for the paper, writing each letter and delivering them to the post office. Where someone sorts them and they get distributed to the various routes they go along. Hundreds of man hours, for a message to go around the world. Thanks to technology this message is virtually free. But the technology replaced countless jobs to get us here. We, as a society, have robbed our countrymen of opportunity by allowing technologies fruits to be captured by a select few people who are no more special than any other human on earth.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdon...
Then I got a job in tech.
I have been automating my roles since I started working and have never had a problem telling people about my tools.
Never seemed wrong to me to become more productive through automation. I estimate my tools replace 15 hours of work per week.
I still end up working well above 40 hours per week so these tools just keep me barely above water.
The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again.