A thought experiment: Imagine a pre-singularity world with near-intelligent anthropomorphic robots which can do most manual tasks - including resource mining, food production and building more of themselves. Imagine most menial white collar jobs have been replaced by clever software written by people on this site. There are still some jobs for humans to do - in game design, fashion, service, music, etc. But any way you look at it, there are not enough jobs for everyone to do. Lets call this the "high unemployment future."
Currently we exist in a "low unemployment present" but if you believe a "high unemployment future" is possible, you should reasonable believe we're smoothly approaching it. So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.
If you're going to bring out the tired argument about how the cotton gin didn't cause mass unemployment, instead I would challenge you to paint a picture of a far off future where most jobs haven't evaporated.
> So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.
We only need to be concerned if we make the assumption that societal expectations won't adjust as well. "Hard work" is seen as a virtue; someone who takes government assistance is pitied at best, considered "parasitic" at worst.
If we take those views into your world it will be a disaster. But instead the real question should be "why does everyone need to have a job?" If we provide for the needs of people displaced by the new machines, we'd free people up to pursue arts, philosophy, or even simple leisure. We'd be living in Bertrand Russell's paradise of 'idleness'.
Wealth is imaginary points. Standard of living is the true measure. If most folks didn't have any money at all, but food housing and entertainment were a civil right, then who's to complain or revolt?
And this is the real question (not the rhetorical "why does everyone need to have a job?"). Can people adjust culturally to the idea that guaranteed income/wealth/whatever could be a good thing, and lead to a pursuit of creativity and innovation, not merely hedonistic, fleeting pleasures?
I.e., can we as a society accept the possibility, and make it a reality, that a guaranteed income (in whatever form it takes), frees us from mindless grunt work and inspires us to pursue our dreams, or do we force those whose jobs have disappeared to suffer poverty because there is no 'need' for them?
Exactly. Consider that automation would be pointless if replacing N foo-craftsmen with foo-machines necessitated the hiring of N equally expensive foo-machine repairmen and assemblers.
Automation reduces jobs, wages, or both.
Nevertheless, we should embrace it. Increasingly strong social safely nets can be used to take up the slack.
I would challenge you to paint a picture of a far off future where most jobs haven't evaporated
200 years ago, nobody would have guessed that there would be millions of computer programmers employed in the world today, because the rise of computers couldn't be predicted. It's likely that in an era where basic needs are provided by robots, people are free to come up with new inventions that lead to the creation of new industries that don't exist today.
It's been well proven adding more developers to a single project has extremely diminished returns, so what you're saying is that there will be a free market demand for a huge amount of different software projects. While it's true that software is eating the world and thus we're seeing a net increase in projects started, we're also seeing a lot of consolidation in the more established software verticals.
Once we've digitized all the existing flows of information present in non-software industries, I would expect the number of developers employeed by a free market to begin to shrink.
so what you're saying is that there will be a free market demand for a huge amount of different software projects
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are currently millions of people of working in an industry that was unheard of a century ago because the modern day computer was invented. There are millions of people who have jobs today related to cars (manufacturing, sales, repair, driving, etc.) because the car was invented. There could be some new invention we haven't thought of today that spawns an industry that will employ millions.
The answer is going to be colonizing other planets/moons. As more manual and semi-skilled labor is outsourced to AI and robots in "modern society", the outskirts of humanity will degenerate into a frontier state because human labor will be cheaper than building and maintaining this automated future.
And I just summarized Firefly. Start learning Chinese.
Ray Kurzweil talks about this in "The Age of Spiritual Machines". It probably comes down to human morality (as with just about everything) with regards to whether this singularity is a good thing or a bad thing.
I purposely poised this pre-singularity to not derail the conversation, but I think the same issues around automation and the morality of wealth redistribution exist.
The simple answer to this, is that most liberal arts-oriented positions will morph into sales and marketing, and technical-oriented ones will morph into technical services (software engineering, maintenance). The world isn't going start starving, or somehow skyrocket into 99% unemployment rates. While there will be a "new norm" of higher unemployment rates for a while, that will quickly subside and people will find jobs, etc. We're just experiencing a cultural shift to a different type of business format. Call it the post-technology era.
Currently we exist in a "low unemployment present" but if you believe a "high unemployment future" is possible, you should reasonable believe we're smoothly approaching it. So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.
If you're going to bring out the tired argument about how the cotton gin didn't cause mass unemployment, instead I would challenge you to paint a picture of a far off future where most jobs haven't evaporated.