Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs
I continue to believe in the idea that automation&#x2F;AI will destroy entire sectors currently requiring labor. It is something that happens gradually, then suddenly.<p>I also believe there&#x27;s &quot;safe&quot; sectors where this is unlikely to ever happen. Good luck making a robot plumber. By the time you solve that, you&#x27;ve solved everything and we&#x27;re entirely obsolete.<p>Package delivery, cash registry, retail jobs...there&#x27;s plenty of high employment sectors at danger. And perhaps many office jobs are at even more danger.<p>One idea is that &quot;as always&quot; we simply move on to &quot;higher order&quot; work. This is nonsense. We don&#x27;t need billions of AI programmers, it would be really crappy AI if that was the case. Nor is it realistic that everybody can do such a demanding job. We&#x27;re talking about billions of relatively lowly educated workers here.<p>Another idea is UBI, or even better...post scarcity. For the optimists, I guess.<p>I expect that neither will happen, instead we&#x27;re already experiencing the solution. You just inject trillions of stimulation money into the economy, which creates (artificial) demand, hence allowing for jobs that otherwise might not exist.<p>Right now, somebody is inventing potato chips flavor #31,122. Nobody asked for it, the world doesn&#x27;t need it, and I hope we can agree that it&#x27;s unimportant. But somebody invents it anyway, somebody designs the packaging, and somebody ships it. You buy it, and might just like it.<p>All these activities aren&#x27;t really demand or need driven, they&#x27;re more like &quot;because we can&quot; jobs. Our world is largely supply and marketing driven, not demand driven from the bottom up. Fluff and endless meaningless luxuries. When I walk through a mall I wonder...do people really buy all this garbage?<p>Put harshly, you can call all of this bullshit jobs. Keeping each other busy. And that&#x27;s what we&#x27;ll continue to do no matter the state of technology. It&#x27;s just a few dials in the financial system.<p>Have you never wondered why everybody deeply cares that one has a job (at any and all costs) yet there&#x27;s never any serious inquiry about the point of the job? Nobody cares if you have a meaningless job, the point is that you have a job. Any job. This reality gives away how the system works.