Predictions of massive job losses to automation miss data that show the opposite
Of course they aren&#x27;t, there is a huge capital cliff to make it happen.<p>Automation is not something that happens slowly in this context. Self driving car research has no impact on the auto industry until the moment tremendous savings can be had <i>in this financial quarter</i> at which point we see the destruction of millions of jobs.<p>Cell phones were not a slow burn advance. The Internet did not slowly take off. These things exploded in (economically speaking) blinks of the eye, and the same happens in every other industrial capacity for automation.<p>The barrier is the up front opportunity cost to bring down the wall and take the costs to that short term economic projection - as long as it costs $150k to replace a $50k truck driver, no publicly traded company is going to do that en masse. It hurts <i>this</i> quarters results too much to accept.<p>The fervor is not about slow burn automation. That has been happening since the industrial revolution, but it is important to not conflict role optimization with role obsolescence. We don&#x27;t have elevator operators anymore. We still have farmers. The foresight is to see that we <i>will</i> have innovations that eliminate labor classes overnight, that they won&#x27;t have an impact until they are deleting industries, and that the opportunity cost to get there is a pill few are willing to swallow so the outcomes get delayed. But we can see they are inevitable, in the same way climate change is an inevitable catastrophe that to many seems not to matter until New York City is under water and we have a billion humans dying of famine in a desertified equatorial region.<p>We are very good at creating bullshit jobs[1] to fill the gradual innovative automation. The job optimization that creeps through every domain constantly pounds us so we create more bullshit jobs to keep the economic system afloat. Instead of looking at statistics relating to peak employment, look at worker satisfaction and confidence that what they do actually means something. Those numbers are telling on how many people actually feel like they are making a real economic contribution[2].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;evonomics.com&#x2F;why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;evonomics.com&#x2F;why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yougov.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;british-jobs-meaningless&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yougov.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;british-jobs-meaningles...</a><p>I just want to postfix this with anyone can make up numbers or just use the numbers out there to rewrite history into their favor. You can make a legitimate argument that automation is fake, that worker satisfaction is high, and that this is all fearmongering. If so, I would ask why there is so much civil unrest surrounding it globally. The statistics and numbers might all be bullshit commissioned by biased interests, but the macroscopic behavior of people can reflect the reality. The entire global movement towards isolationist nationalism and totalitarianism is centralized  on the obsolescence of people and the rise of bullshit work. People feel abandoned, unfulfilled, or forgotten. It is a <i>growing</i> trend. It is valuable not to ignore why that might be.