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[mandyessa]

Recently I have seen many Cisco commercials about machines fixing machines, and how this is the"human network". Putting this together with the unemployment rate, I have been asking this question: How do we replace jobs people can do with machines, then blame those people for not working

Comments

[camlost]

It's a hard problem to solve. The issue is that capital and technology could make the vast majority of people obsolete. But, we've already had gone through that at least once -- the US has less than 2% of the population working in agriculture, where it used to have a majority.

I think the "utopia" is where people don't have to work [to survive], but choose to do so; creative work, or an artisan craft or work in an area where machines still aren't as good as humans. There's no reason to expect that those won't continue to grow, though it will likely change in character. Our economy is now 1/3 service? I doubt that was the case in 1800.

Also, this is an active genre of sci-fi, IIRC. What to do when you don't have to do anything.

[nemene]

When the powered loom was introduced, people cried out against it saying that it would put peopl out of work. Ten years later over 10 times as many people were working in the textile industry then before the adoption of the powered loom. What happened? The loom made workers so much more efficient that clothes could be made for a fraction of the previous cost, and now everyone (or close to) could afford to have a wardrob of lcothing instead of three outfits. In my work I help companies implement solutions that greatly reduce the man-hours needed to access and process the company data. One of the early projects I was involved in took a very manual month end process that toook 40 days (yes, they were still processing January into March), and was all that several people did. We helped implement a system that did most of the work automatically, with almost no human effor involved and did it in three days. To the best of my knowledge no one at that company lost their job, they found new tasks for each of those people actaully

[mandyessa]

So, after you have been replaced by tech the first time, after you were trained to a job, who pays for you to be retrained? Who pays to feed you and your kids while you do get retrained? What if you do everything right? and still

[nemene]

As I said, my feeling ranges depending on the individual situation. I have encountered multiple people who act like the world owes them, and do nothing. Also, at some point if you are out of work anyway, you might as well be out of work pursuing new skills. There are options out there if you look, and most of them are not government funded. I know multiple other people who are great examples of reinventing themselves professionally and making it work.

People are far more likely to be in this situation when an industry collapses due to ineffeciency and inability to change (US auto industry), then because new technology made some people 'obsolete'. So any method of tyring to address this problem needs to be careful not to actually long term create a worse one.