During World War II, one of the U.S.'s great technical marvels was the Norden bombsight. Production, by GM, needed to be ramped up: but labor in Detroit was exceedingly tight. The only sufficiently large group available, who were hired, trained, and succeeded in production, were "superannuated Negro prostitutes." The reason the Germans didn't produce their own bombsight in equal numbers is that they believed that such a device could only be produced by highly trained, laboriously apprenticed technicians.

IMO, the idea that there are worthless people, in any significant number, is a pernicious and evil meme.

Side note, the Norden bombsight was pretty useless in actual combat. The German solutions weren't much better.

But precision bombing was the fundamental engineering challenge of WWII. And the US did solve it, twice. Sort of.

BF Skinner's pigeon guided missiles were the first way, they were crazy effective. They were just too weird for everyone.

Giant irradiating bombs that don't need any precision struck everyone as a much more sensible approach, so we went with that instead.

I think the last 70 years or so would have been better if we'd gone the pigeon route.

That is a nice story, but maybe we should face the replacement of human labor head on instead of lying to ourselves.

People have been predicting the demise of the workforce ever since the industrial age (and probably before that, too). With every technological innovation we cry "it's the end of work as we know it!" Yet here we are, hundreds of years in the future, with jobs abound. I'm skeptical that will ever change. We humans are great at coming up with shit for people to do for a dollar.

Or, "There is a long history of exaggerated concern, rightly derided by economists, with the replacement and hence displacement of workers by machines."

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/03/automation-and-emp...

Abrupt technological advances can disrupt certain industries very quickly, and it can take a while for the wages and the workforce size to find a new equilibrium. But I agree, that's much different than the sudden and dystopian end of all labor.

However, it is equally true that industry never provided as much jobs, and not at the same conditions, that agriculture did. And the service industry never provided 50% as much jobs as the industry ever did, and completely excludes a decent percentage of workers.

And people are getting displaced in the service industry too, and there is nothing even pretending to replace the service industry. People go from A -> B -> C -> D, with A agro, B industry, C services and D ... well there is no D.

"Technology displaces labor" has a strong intuitive appeal. But I don't think it is very predictive... it never quite fits the data.

I'd be on board if we had seen investment over the last five years flood away from labor towards equipment and technology. But we didn't, we saw 20-30% reductions in spending on nonresidential equipment and software.[1][2] Declines in purchases of non-labor productive capital were far steeper than reductions labor (they're just harder to see for the average person).

It wasn't labor vs. equipment this time, the decline in labor was mostly driven by the decline in consumption.

I'm not sure there's strong consensus to explain the decline in consumption. One theory is that the decline in consumption happened primarily because households woke up one morning and realized that they were broke from years of credit card debt and housing investment [3], but there are a million other theories.

On the whole though, I don't think you find better worker conditions in agricultural societies. Medieval Europe and North Korea come to mind. Backbreaking labor all day for the privilege of regular mass famines... I don't think it's for me.

[1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/events/2013/january/f...

[2] http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_displa...

[3] http://www.perpustakaan.depkeu.go.id/FOLDERJURNAL/w17830.pdf

I'm not saying working conditions were better in agricultural societies, but employment (meaning percentage of people working) was better.

Ironically vacation days was also much, much better than we have today. In an agricultural society, you'd probably have ~100 vacation days a year (in trade for having to work weekends - but not sundays) for 4-5 weeks twice a year.

I'd be very surprised, but eh, could be true. Really just a research question.

I'm a big fan of economic history as a discipline, if you have anything to recommend, I'd love to check it out.

UPDATE: I found one research paper claiming that "The statistical record reveals a high and growing labor force to population ratio in America for most of the last two centuries." http://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers03/03-13.pdf

I don't take that to have settled the question, I'd like to go back further, and make sure we properly account for the reversal of this trend between the 1930s and the 1960s. But it certainly is a provocative set of data.

It will be nice to give everyone a basic income when robots have automated away all the jobs, but what do we do this decade?

Don't be lazy. If you think basic income is feasible with state and city assistance, run the numbers for San Francisco and California. Otherwise one side has numbers and you have idle, unquantified speculation.