This is how technology always works. 200 years ago, most of us worked on farms. 100 years ago, most worked as domestic workers or in factories. Now most are white-collar or service workers. As technology evolves, so too do our jobs.
150 years ago the agricultural sector employed roughly 80% of American workers. Today, it employs less than 3%. It may be hard to imagine looking forward rather than back, but dynamic economies are capable of experiencing such dramatic shifts AND of absorbing and reallocating the labor towards more productive uses. They key thing to understand is that once certain modes of production become less efficient relative to alternatives, often because of technological advances, it frees our resources and productive energies to engage in new enterprises. It's true that employment dislocations that occur from rapid technological advancement can cause great transitional distress; that is why it's important as a society that we find humane and efficient ways of supporting people through these changes. However, the net result of progress is that we are all better off. No one can say exactly what the baristas or the project managers of today will become, no more than anyone could have predicted what would have become of the farmworkers who were displaced in the great migration towards a service economy. But, the last 150 years have seen a veritable explosion in the specialization and profusion of occupations which were previously economically unviable. I see no reason why we should not expect the same kind of evolution going forward.
We can argue this all day long since neither of us has data to back up our assertions. So, I'll reframe this somewhat.
Technology in the past created new more efficient processes, freeing people to create new processes. That describes your example above and technology advancements largely to date. What's different now is not that we are making more efficient processes, rather technology is displacing human skills. Concretely, when the horse was replaced with a car both still required a driver. But, the driver was so much more productive thanks to the advancement in the process. However, today, it is not the process that is advanced it is the human skill that is replaced--ie. there will be no driver. So, it is the human skills that technology is encroaching on. So, anything that I can physically do, we could soon engineer a robot to do as well. Price/performance may not make sense today, but we know tech gets cheaper/better every year, labour doesn't. So, it is not processes that are being replaced but human skill.
So, with this in mind, I don't think you can argue that we'll have full employment in 100 years time.
Maybe for 25 years in tech but it’s been like this for 125 years at least. Once the Industrial Revolution really got cranking, workers are supposed to get chewed up and discarded.
So, when we came up with agriculture some millenia ago, all those jobless people, those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless, did they? What about when we came up with machines in the 19th century? All those people in agriculture would still be jobless, but they are not, are they?
Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at least. People are very good at reinventing themselves as long as they have an incentive (food, money) to do so.
We'll find new works. In the 1800s ~70% of the workers were employed in agriculture. Someone noticing the progress of technology would have predicted just like you. (In fact Keynes did make a similar prediction.) It didn't come true because they failed to see the evolution of new jobs like programmer, animation designer, cinematographer etc. Why this time is different?
You vastly underestimate the technology differences between 500 b.c. and 1600ad. The printing press for example. Windmills/waterwheels for another. Did the automation of grain mills result in mass unemployability?
> office and service sector jobs -- because that was another underdeveloped sector.
Or perhaps automation allowed more people to pursue that type of work? Was working in an air conditioned office an option for your average person in 500bc? Doubt it. Instead it sounds like we created a whole new type of work in response to a society wide change in technology.
> software and the internet makes lots of office jobs and procedures obsolete
Some, but fewer than you would think, and it makes many other jobs accessible. Often technology advances are unskilled people + tech/process improvements displacing skilled artisans. The factory worker jobs were an example of technology displacing skilled workers. Computers and the internet allow for unskilled/untrained people to enter fields that they would be unsuited for alternatively. How many retail bankers could do an amortization table without the computer's assistance?
> I'm not sure how anyone in a technology forum can believe...
Precisely the opposite. Technology eliminating work has happened several times in the past. Just never with disaster. We always seem to find new things to work on. The greater efficiency we have the more our horizon expands about what we can pursue as 'work'. If you were a good actor in 500BC, what would that buy you? Some local notoriety? Would it be 'work' that you get paid for in your local town? Probably not. Now it means you get a private jet. New areas will expand to fill the gaps.
Even among the industries being automated, the results are often not that dire. There is a milder version of Jevon's paradox at work here. Once you can produce something with great efficiency and low cost, people will demand more of it. Sometimes demand will even increase faster than efficiency and you'll have net employment growth.
Exactly, it's just the evolution of work based on changes of the working environment, mindset and needs. In the past we had only manual labour, then the (bad) machines came along and we had factories/industries, then the (bad) computers came along and we have remote working...and so on...
And textile workers were put out of work in the 19th century because new machines rendered their jobs obsolete. But would you really argue that we should roll back back 200 years of progress in the textile industry just to employ more people? What about the fact that textiles would be vastly more expensive and of limited quantity? Do you choose to have all of your clothes hand-woven or do you let technology take those jobs?
The only real difference here is that it's a technology you didn't grow up with that is putting people out of work, so it's seen as unusual to you. We make this choice of technology over manual labour in virtually every industry every single day. But it's normal because we grew up with it. And the kids that grow up with this technology today will see this as normal too. Eliminating cashier jobs in supermarkets isn't fundamentally any different to eliminating textile worker jobs in the 18th century.
And yet somehow the employment and unemployment rates in the developed world are pretty healthy, and there are more manufacturing jobs in the developing world than ever.
The point of technology is to reduce the number of people doing a given task, freeing up that labor to perform higher value activities, or the same activity to a higher value. So fewer people need to be sailors, road work gang members or field laborers and more of us can be TV presenters, computer game artists and SCUBA diving instructors. Occupations representative of whole industries the world couldn't have afforded to support a hundred years ago. Vast swathes of the population back then were doing jobs that hardly even exist anymore, yet somehow we don't have vast swathes of the population out of work. That doesn't even factor in the massive transfer of female labor from household work to the working class and professional labor markets.
Technology does not kill jobs: instead it allows the new jobs to be created elsewhere.
50,000 BC: your "job" (finding food) so dominated your life that your entire community followed it around.
20,000 BC: farming began. Your "job" is in the field by your house.
1700 AD: agricultural revolution. Technology allows smaller number to produce food. This allows industrial revolution. More specifically, this creates surplus food which means people can move. And so jobs can move. But it also means that areas that cannot produce food competitively no longer have to. Surplus food allows jobs to move to where the water wheels and resources are to commence industrialization.
1800 AD: The invention of the steam engine frees jobs from the need to be near flowing water: i.e. to move to where the resources are, or where the need to be. For much of the UK this was near ports as raw materials (e.g. cotton) came by ship. Bonus if the port is near a coal field. Again, areas that do not have cheap access to transport and coal, no longer have jobs.
1970 AD: Oil, giant ships, containerization and "free" trade allows jobs to move where wages are cheaper. Entire nations are uncompetitive at manufacturing.
2005 AD: Communications revolution. International calls are free. Service industry jobs move to where wages are cheaper. Entire nations are uncompetitive for service industry.
2008 AD: Computer Vision revolution: computers can now do picking and sorting that previously required a human.
201X AD: Robot Dexterity revolution: computers can now do fine motor skills, such as stitching shoes. Nike finally stops using child labor.
What is left for humans?
Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries.
Is this true? Or is it the case that as technology kills jobs, the unemployed find make work? That is, even if the unemployment level in a country has stayed the same, does it mean that the new jobs that the displaced workers perform are useful, or just a drain on society? Sure in the 19th century there were new non-make-work jobs. But today? Example: people working at Hallmark stores. Example: layer upon layer of middle and upper management. Perhaps it doesn't matter: if society can support make-work jobs, because of efficiencies elsewhere, then as long as people are employed it doesn't matter how. The problem would be if those make-work jobs could no longer be supported. This is what is happening: it is not in China's interest any more to support the vast inefficiencies of the US economic system. Make-work jobs are going away.
Finally, WWII: we destroyed most of the world economy to the point where the US was the world economy (ok, 75% of it). Does this have anything to do with the US having full employment (i.e. hiding technology's job kill) - and if so, now that the rest of the world has caught up, might we now see that the US economy cant support the make-work jobs?
Since the industrial revolution ~250 years ago, human workers have constantly been replaced by machines. All this time people have been sure it would result in unemployment, and all this time they've been wrong.
A worker today is about 30x as productive as one 250 years ago, because of this technological development.
Now, of course, it could be different this time. The past doesn't dictate the future etc. But at a minimum I'd want to hear why from someone who understands the history.
>"It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?"
Two hundred years ago, most people worked in agriculture.
Then came technologies such as the McCormick Reaper, Whitney's Gin and Newcomen's engine - away went the vast majority of that work.
Yes much of it was replaced with something else and much of what replaced it was more pleasant, but the conclusion that the jobs which replaced agriculture are permanent is not forgone.
[edit] The technology upon which jobs depend in the modern era is finance, and that has been largely diverted to purposes other than creating jobs in the US over the past several decades.
Consider also that in the past, many of the jobs shifts took place on a generational scale. A farmer--instead of having 10 children that were farmers or farmers' wives, and one that was a non-farmer--would have one child (or less) that became a farmer, and the rest would become non-farmers.
The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.
After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?
Technology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more exciting challenges.
The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is still under 5%.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
I don't think anyone claimed that the new jobs would be replaced one to one with jobs maintaining the new technology, just that some of the new jobs would be in maintaining the new technology and some would be in new industries that we haven't even thought of. For a big historical example of this, look at the decrease in labor usage for farming over the last couple centuries. Where did all the people who used to work in agriculture go to? Like 1% of them now remain on the farms, maintaining the technology that displaced the other 99%, who are now dispersed across whatever other modern industry that we didn't used to have (and, we'll note, the pundits at the time highly doubted that most of the 99% being displaced on farms would find be able to find alternative positions).
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