When people say that the jobs will shift to other sectors, they are really saying that an elite few will control all the wealth and if you can't appeal to their self-interest you are expendable.
The elite few who control all the wealth right now are not even spending or investing their money. They are just sitting on it. Because they'd rather have the money tomorrow than the services of the poor today. This is another way of saying that the current world's poor are expendable to the elite.
I don't see this mindset changing any time soon. All logic indicates that the world's poor are going to starve to death in their ghettos while the elite technologists sit on their money piles -- money piles defended by predator drones and LDAP.
As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.
Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.
In the industrial revolution the luddites smashed the machines and threatened the elite with guillotines and Marxism. They could do this because guns were cheap and plentiful, and a group of men could be made into an army no matter how poor they were.
In response, the elite created social programs that would help the poor to become economically useful, and the elite would also pay the poor to join the military and conquer other nations, for profit.
Today, the elite's technological military superiority totally eclipses a mob of unemployed men. A group of angry poor can't even smash windows unmolested anymore, let alone break into corporate headquarters or private estates. Police are sophisticated crowd controllers who make use of psychological and non-lethal warfare that not only dominates but also pacifies.
It's not that new jobs won't be created. It's that the poor have nothing to offer to the rich, and so the poor are expendable, and the poor have no power, and so the poor are allowed to die.
Having worked in a factory before with everyone from managers, engineers, machinists, and line workers... I think you give people too much credit.
It may sound elitist, or depressing, but for many people in this world there is no hope of them occupying an intellectual job. Either through sheer genetic lottery, nurture (or lack thereof), there are an awful lot of people with not the education or intelligence to become creative innovators.
> "A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people."
A military aviator requires hundreds, if not thousands of hours of training time, and if you've ever met one, you'd realize that they're sharp as a tack. Aviators are probably some friggin' smart people - I do not believe they are at all a good, representative sample of the rest of the population, large segments of which cannot do anything but low-skill labor - and can never be fully retrained to perform as creative/intellectual job types.
Perhaps their children can, but these people, alive and needing jobs right now, are fucked for life.
> "What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people."
That's OP's point - we are at a turning point where, perhaps, these rules no longer apply. The majority of the world has historically been employed in agriculture or unskilled industrial labor. When we invented the car, carriage makers went out of work - but more unskilled jobs popped up in its place. When the cotton gin was invented, wide swathes of people went out of work - but there was demand for unskilled labor elsewhere. There may be periods of pain and unemployment, but ultimately the majority of these eliminated folk found other, low-skill jobs elsewhere.
We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled work, but not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor, in any sector. If there's a Wal-Mart greeter created for every factory job lost in the USA, we might be ok, but there really isn't. And the greatest problem is that the gap between an unskilled laborer vs. a creative service-sector "innovator" is so disparate, that no possibility for retraining exists for the vast majority of the recently-made-redundant.
There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre.
It's depressing and hard to accept, but I think this is the way it'll go down.
The sexy young waitress can, with some training, take on other low-skill labor jobs. A hit to earnings? Perhaps, but livable in the old days.
This has been the story for the unskilled labor class for decades - industries rise and fall, but when training is a matter of days and weeks, instead of years, labor mobility is extremely fluid, and retraining for a new position is possible.
A degree takes years, and tens of thousands of dollars these people don't have. Not only that, how many have the educational foundation to take on a job that requires strong understanding of maths and science? America's failure with STEM is really biting its ass right now.
We're also at the end of the first era in history where some forms of unskilled labor have put people solidly in the middle class. Unskilled middle-class work is being eliminated; there's some demand for unskilled workers, but not at those income levels.
This is going to lead to some hard transitions, which are going to take time to shake out.
Also, who is going to pay the bills while you are learning for your next job?
Innovation happens mostly during periods of abundance not during periods of actual scarcity. Innovation requires access to sufficient resources for experimentation and testing.
If scarcity really was the mother of invention then there would be no poor?
Not a straw man at all.
Low Skill Industry will just change its definition. Maybe computer programming becomes a "low-skill", commoditized field. Who knows? It will be probably be something we haven't even thought about yet.
It's funny you ask someone to "prove it". You are also restating a popular theory, but your theory has failed when we look at economic history.
>But that era appears to be coming to an end.
That's news to me. Before the recession, there were more jobs being created than at any point in history.
Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.)
The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to "innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will.
Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.