"As more jobs are getting automated, it opens up "new" job opportunities in new fields that are coming up."
That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?
It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor.
Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.
> That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?
More importantly, if we were replacing less-skilled jobs that are being automated with more-skilled, higher-paying jobs at a 1:1 ratio, automation would be driving up production costs rather than controlling them, and there'd be no motivation to do it.
I think you are confused in the same way that people are confused who think that economic pie is fixed size. The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise - and that something, whatever it is, would be useful and profitable
> The point of automation is it would expand the overall economic pie so that those more skilled higher paying jobs would be necessary to do something that would not happen otherwise
No, the point -- i.e., why firms adopt automation -- is to cut the production costs of the firms adopting automation.
The hoped for social benefit -- hoped for largely by people who aren't the ones adopting automation -- is of an expanded overall economy that not only provides aggregate growth but also distributes that growth in a nice manner so that not only does the mean income improve, but the total share of population productively employed stays the same or improves, and everyone does better.
There's no real reason to expect that is either likely as the near-term result of automation, or necessary as its long-term result as a result of pure market forces. And it is certainly not the point of automation from the point of view of the firms doing the automation.
That's what I've been taught in school, but I'm not sure it's that simple. For one thing, I would say the jobs getting automated are less qualified, manual jobs. And new jobs opening up require more skills. But can we expect everyone to perform a highly skilled or intellectual job?
It seems to me that either we have to accept that a proportion of the population doesn't work, or we have subsidy manual jobs to compete with developing countries with cheap labor.
Either way, the ones benefiting from automation have to pay for the unskilled to survive.