LogFAQs > #952421843

It's not really a matter of liking it or not - it's happening and we need to figure out how to adapt to an automated world.

IronBornCorps posted...

Automation doesn't reduce jobs.

Of course it does. Automation (and its predecessor, industrialization) has been reducing jobs for centuries. Automation and industrialization are the reason why we've shifted from a primarily goods-based economy (for much of human history, ~80% of our work force went to the cultivation of food; today that number is less than 5%) to a service based one.

The very definition of "automation" is to get a machine to do a job that was previously done by a human. And the only way that's economical is if jobs - or their benefits - go down. Like, say that I'm the CEO of Company X that makes XYZ widgets. I pay my 20 employees $50k a year each, for a total of $1 million a year. Then a robot salesman comes along and tells me he can automate half my production line. The only way that offer makes economical sense for me is if my overall pay for the robots works out to $500k a year or less.

This is a bit oversimplistic, but it shows the critical problem here. If the robot company sells me the robots to automate my production line at $400k a year, that means that their own employees that worked to build those robots must cost, at most, $400k a year minus the cost of materials and overhead. For my ten now-unemployed former workers who are looking for jobs and who, collectively, previously made $500k a year, they couldn't just go work for the robot factory without either taking a pay cut or having some of them remain unemployed.

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