This could have been said about the industrial revolution, invention of agriculture, etc. Each time in our history when a new technology has made our lives more efficient some people have lost their jobs. In their place more jobs have been created that would never have been thought of before.
Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements on society new jobs will be created all over the world. Yes checkout clerks will no longer exist just as many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In their place we will see more software developers, consultants, entertainers and artists.
> “there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.”
I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined.
I agree, there will probably be more wealth - I just think the distribution of that wealth may well be societally damaging.
Of course, definitions of skilled and unskilled labor change too. A reasonably skilled cotton picker is still "unskilled labor" to an economy that needs machinists. A highly trained machinist is equivalently unskilled in an economy that requires programmers.
If they have no skills, they never had very good prospects. Even "simple" farmhands need to have some skill at tending to the farm. It's not like you could just stand by a conveyor belt with a dumb look on your face and call yourself a factory worker for very long.
That was my point, and why I wrote "simple" in quotation marks. Even jobs that are viewed as "unskilled" generally involve some kind of skill — farmhands, factory workers, customer service representatives, etc. Any job that truly requires no skill essentially has no job security anyway, as the worker literally brings nothing to the table. The actual complaint here is that the demand for various skills waxes and wanes.
Jobs like working in mcdonalds obviously require a certain skillset, but that skillset can be taught in a very limited timeframe, as opposed to skilled jobs where that educations takes a much longer amount of time. I'm saying that the availability of such jobs seems to be on the wane.
I appreciate that such jobs are undesirable, but they're much in demands by those unable to take up a skilled trade, or those whose skillset has been rendered obsolete. They might not be great jobs, but they beat the alternative of nothing.
Right. I'm using the traditional definition of 'unskilled labour', which is generally that which does not require a high degree of training/education - not none at all. I believe that this class of labour is reducing in availability - which is a problem for a substantial proportion of the population.
I wonder if this will have knock-on implications for those of us who have relatively high levels of training. Right now, if my specialism becomes obsolete I can at least pick up a non-specialist alternative job - will this be the case in the future?
Real wages may have decreased, but total compensation has been increasing steadily, at least on a per worker basis instead of a per-household one. A lot of that has been increases in the cost of health insurance paid for by employers, but some has been more vacation time, 401K matching, etc.
It might not be true for the whole workforce, but it is true for the median. For the rich healthcare costs make up basically nothing in their compensation, so all of their compensation increase show up as higher wages. The really poor often don't get healthcare. But for the median, they get healthcare and healthcare expenses are fairly big compared to their wages.
This doesn't mean that the compensation of the median worker has perfectly tracked GDP growth, because there has been a moderate but genuine increase in inequality in compensation. But it isn't nearly as big as the increase in the wage gap, and saying "real median wages have decreased" is misleading.
This is irrelevant because our economy is currently in the middle of the "retooling" phase (c.f. Luddite, Industrial Revolution). The wealth will be fundamentally unevenly distributed until new skilled work takes hold.
Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements on society new jobs will be created all over the world. Yes checkout clerks will no longer exist just as many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. In their place we will see more software developers, consultants, entertainers and artists.