They may do that.

Too many people take it for a guarantee that technology by itself must do that, and can never result in a situation that a human hand is needed to steer us away from.

Well not really. Computer industry pay is increasingly becoming bi-modal at least for a decade. The highly paid programmer is just a US phenomenon and that too in few major IT hubs.

There are lot of programers/IT admins who would make pretty decent money in late 90s to 2000s. And they make less than they were 20 years ago and yes all hadoop/big data training did not really make any better paid.

Inflation adjusted IT salaries have gone down in lot of places in the world. Of course 1 percenters of IT in FAANG+ make it sound like IT salaries are going up heavily for everyone.

That's simply not true. Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets, even more so for young people (out of college/school/university). The salaries are far away from Silicon Valley levels, but are still very high locally.

I've heard from a lot of my colleagues that they couldn't afford to have the same lifestyle in an Western capital city with equivalent IT salaries. I know I wouldn't be able to rent in downtown Amsterdam, Paris or Milano with my equivalent IT earnings were I to live in those cities the same way I now do in Bucharest.

It's true. Unless you work for a FAANG, or some Fin-Tech or a unicorn flush with cash, dev wages in Western EU are not higher than Eastern EU anymore.

I know devs in Poland and Romania making way more than me and some friends do in Austria/France/Belgium.

It's because of huge amount of outsourcing from US companies moving directly to Eastern EU, pushing the wages higher than what Western EU based companies can offer locally, coupled with the higher taxes in the Western countries, meaning devs in the West taking home lower wages than their counterparts in the East.

Someone here said it well, but I don't have the original post to quote anymore: {a cleaner in Sweden makes way more than a cleaner in Poland, but a dev in Poland can end up making as much or more than a dev in Sweden}. That's whack but that's the reality of supply and demand caused by the bleed from the US tech boom to certain regions.

That's not really true. I live in Austria and many more skilled professions earn better than most devs here as the local SW industry sucks, almost no product-based companies and a market overabundant with talent.

I'm sure in hot markets with plenty of product based companies like London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Eastern Europe the situation is better.

0 - https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Junior_Software_Eng...

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/708972/average-annual-no...

2 - https://www.paylab.com/it/salaryinfo

The thing about management is what I've heard Italian devs complain about (and it's a common complaint is tech-weaker countries), that to get decent money you have to transition to management, whereas countries with stronger tech sectors like the US have more companies that let engineers continue to grow as engineers (or architects).

Was my original comment and point. Salaries for tech are very good for the local markets, even if they might be considered low compared to other markets.

Of course, part of this may be that the wage spectrum as a whole is compressed compared to the US, but that's an explanation, not a contradiction.

Yes, it is in any capitalist economy, because income distribution isn't normal. In the US, for instance, per capita GDP is about $64k, but median personal income is a little over $35k, and median pay of a full-time worker income, annualized, is just under $45k. An individual worker making just over the per capita GDP is doing quite well.

This is the main Problem. Technical excellence is not valued and rewarded enough. The best Engineers get promoted to Mediocre managers because that's the only way to move forward. The result is an economy focused on micromanaging for small gains instead of innovation for big gains.

The situation in the EU is the same as in the US, and outside the local hubs, wages are lower.

Any evidence?

Source?

And not all automation increases worker productivity, lots of it just eliminates workers from certain jobs altogether, e.g. self driving cars / trucks.

On the other hand, turns out that once a shirt is cheap humans will buy not just one extra so there's one to wear and one to wash, but a dozen, or hundreds. And they'll throw it away when it's a little worn not when it falls apart. So while industrialisation of fabric and clothing production made clothes cheap, the result wasn't that fewer people were employed in that work but that we just all bought more clothes.

I hope he's not listening to tunes. A change in the sound it's making is often the first warning that your $500,000 piece of machinery is about to self destruct.

Whose machine?

Think: there used to be a theoretical limit to how much regulation could exist, because the regs had to be known by a person (otherwise how are they enforced?).

Now we have regtech. A whole industry built on automating compliance.

How long before each individual needs a regtech software program (or two!) just to function in society? I'm not talking about tax filing, that's just the start.

We don’t even have self-driving cars yet, how can you know what effect they have?

When there's an inequality in productivity, more productive firma will see an increase in labour, bit that doesn't mean the whole sector does.

In practice some people want money itself, which is an empirical contradiction of says law. There are also people who hoard jobs because they like them, which is bad for people who want the money to actually spend it.