We have yet to bring back ice delivery for the sake of the delivery staff. We have fridges now. Life does not end because jobs are eliminated, it just changes.

The economic term is underemployment, where your only options are roles which pay less than what your training level and capacity are.

Lose your job as a foreman at a factory, and you can switch to being a manager at Mc D.

Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

This is all optimization of resources and ownership of course so it’s essentially a question of how the share of the new efficiency derived surplus is split.

Part of which could go to things like keeping theoretical research programs alive.

It certainly could, but should it? If that research is into something that's a dead end, should we keep researching it to avoid underemployment of researchers? It does seem to me that underemployment as a loss function by itself is particularly prone to local maximums.

I’d argue yes.

I mean these are physics and mathematical specialists.

I’d rather have a country that can keep such people engaged and active than lose them.

I mean what other options do you see? They could join hedge funds. Open an ML based startup.

In the end someone else has to work on this material- the problem isn’t going to go away.

And it sounds like this requires tools to do measurements of astral phenomena. Considering that America lost its telescope recently, and further investment is unlikely, I don’t think the investment in ancillary fields is high either.

No, these people should be exploring new sub-fields. When you reach the end of a vein of rich ore you don't go ask the government to pay you keep digging in that same direction. You start digging somewhere else. That is what we need string theorists to do.

You lost the thread. We’re not talking about eliminating funding for physics. We’re talking about not funding very specific fields that haven’t produced anything useful for decades.

Someone with an IQ high enough to become a physics professor can't retrain, even within another sub-field of physics?

Moving about a bit is not losing people, and if they're not providing something useful then they've already been lost anyway, and the opportunity cost of what they might be doing usefully elsewhere is also spent. May as well employ them at McDonalds, except they'd probably be rubbish at it.

> Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

An economist visits Communist China and they proudly show him a railway being built. He notices the workers are using shovels to dig the holes, instead of construction machines.

- Why don't you use construction machines?

- We care a lot about the workers here, using construction machines would make some of them unemployed!

- Well, in that case, I suggest you make them use spoons instead.