If it gets to the point where there isn't any unskilled labor left to do, we can always choose as a society to vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone. We have already moved in this direction a bit, and I expect to see more things along the lines of guaranteed minimum income in the future.

And as we automate other things, life will continue to improve, but humans won't ever run out of things to do.

Two centuries ago, well over 90% of income earners were farmers. Today, it's like 2% and dropping. But unemployment didn't become a more massive problem than it was then. Labor became available for other purposes, enabling the industrial revolution.

In 1820 if you said that 99% of farm labor will be replaced by machines in 100 years, you'd have been given the response of 'bullshit'. And yet a century later we had done just that.

With that redistribution of labor came the largest wars the world had ever seen. We don't even have to eliminate 'whole classes of work' to destabilize the working world and economy. Just eliminating 25% of work and not coming up with something new for the now jobless to do will create a wave of populism that can cause problems.

Now, 2-3%. One in 4 people had their profession superseded. A lot of that slack was taken up by industry (and war and death), but that took 20-30 years to catch up.

Is there a pool of work for people to absorb 25% of the present labor force? Most of the emerging technologies I see are labor-saving, not labor consuming.

Two possibilities for big labor demand in the next few decades: - healthcare and assistance for the elderly - removing development restrictions in booming cities, unleashing an epic (or Chinese-level) building boom

Both have fundamental political foundations and won't be solved solely by technology.

I can't imagine people running out of productive things to do. After all, can making movies be automated? How about becoming a professional dancer or athlete? Writing books? Building a custom car? Making art of any sort? Elder care (a booming business as baby boomers age)? Research? Tutoring?

There have never been greater opportunities for productive work than now.

I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle. When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.

No innovation today comes even remotely close disrupting that large a % of the population.

One of the most labor intensive things humans did for 1000s of years was making of cloth, an absurd amount of work. That was as well disrupted.

The pace of labor disruption today is WAY slower and the dynamic economy is WAY faster at producing new uses of labor. Hence why we have not actual seen this supposed collapse in the amount of required labor despite an endless parade of supposedly smart people predicting it for 200 years straight.

For most of human history, most human labor was engaged in agriculture. During the industrial revolution, there was a mass shift from agriculture to factory work. This produced considerable social disruption, but did result in a new semi-stable employment system: over a period of some decades, the countrysides were largely depopulated, people congregated in the cities, and the factories were an employment sink for the newly arrived urbanites. Took until probably the mid 20th century to sort out in any kind of reasonable way (the tenement slums of Manhattan were probably initially a net decrease in quality of life for many former farmers, but they were eventually cleaned up).

I'd say that's actually the only real example of a completed shift in mass employment at that scale. The key thing that made it work particularly well was that assembly lines needed a large amount of labor, with a nicely arrayed gradation of skill: they could absorb a large amount of essentially undifferentiated unskilled labor fresh from the countryside, which could then "work its way up" by gaining more skills to serve in increasingly more skilled roles.

The other example of a shift we have is the currently in-progress one, of moving from industrial employment to service-sector and/or information-sector employment. It's less clear where that's going, what the new mass employment sinks will be (if any), and what the skill ladder will be.

That's the way it's worked out in the real world. About 1% of the population produces all our food. And that frees the rest of us up to make movies. And write novels. And organize the world's information. And allow people to live 30 miles from their jobs. And let them cross the country or travel the world on a whim. And live in climate-controlled boxes with nice furniture.

That's also the long-term solution to unemployment. Eventually, somebody figures out something else that the rest of the population would like to have, and puts all of those out-of-work workers to work doing it. The computer industry didn't even exist 50 years ago. The automobile and household appliance industries didn't exist 50 years before that. The oil, railroad, middle management, engineering, and office worker industries didn't exist 50 years before that. These have all been born out of workers being freed up from previous shrinking industries (eg. manufacturing, domestic servants, farming, textiles) and put to use in new emerging ones.

But note that this is only non-farm employment. Currently about 1% of the US's population works in agriculture. At around the same time, 31% of people did farm work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/the-life-of-americ...

I'll note that offshoring is also driven by technological change. In particular, cheap global shipping and communication. It's true a bunch of manufacturing jobs went to places with cheaper labor. But if those jobs had stayed here, there would still be a lot less of them because our higher labor prices make it more worthwhile to spend on factory automation.

Another area where technology makes a big difference is in household labor. In 1910, 14.5% people were engaged in either domestic or personal service. Now it's 1%. We owe a lot of that to things like the washing machine and the dishwasher.

In terms of magnitude of displacement, I don't think what we are seeing now, or anticipate seeing in the next decade is of a different kind than what we saw with the mechanization of agriculture. What concerns me is:

  1) The rate at which these disruptions are occurring, and
  2) The ability for displaced labor to find other opportunities in the economy. 

For example, farming is pretty vital as work per se and it used to cover the majority of people. But these days, if a percentage of people can do the farming for everyone then what would constitute equally meaningful jobs for the rest of the 99%? We basically need food, clothes, housing, and heating. Then there are things that we "need" (but can do without) such as electricity, plumbing, running water, etc. Some people would become artisans to produce specialized goods or merchants to trade those goods. These are pretty quickly and efficiently implemented with the current efficiency and if that was all, we'd probably have employed few percent of the work force. What's there left to do that would genuinely cover the rest 90% of the work force?

Countries with falling populations will just need more robots. Mass immigration isn't going to help, but this is one of those problems easily solved with tech.