Automation

I didn't read the whole thread, so someone may have mentioned this, but in the past, when automation has been improved a few things happened.

1) Displacement was usually limited to industry or a handful of specific jobs across industries.

2) There were plenty of other sectors for displaced workers to move into, so automation resulted in a sort of disruption that, in the long-run has always worked itself out and arguably made things better as people were freed up to even more and different types of jobs.

In the past, replacing a worker with a tablet meant more jobs creating, designing, fixing, selling and deploying tablets. The challenge coming in the next 15-30 years where the next kind of automation will be able to do the job for the end-user, but also design, fix, sell, and deploy itself. That will be transformative and if you are under 50 and lead a long life, you will live to see it.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it will result in a paradigm shift in the way economies work today.

csbrown28 said:

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it will result in a paradigm shift in the way economies work today.

Click to expand...

People often overestimate how things actually change. A lot of things you see around you, as well as things you do yourself, are just fancy improvements on things that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. It takes time to reinvent the wheel. But until it happens, most people take a small step forward and instead of using technology to do something completely new, they use new technology to do the same job they have always done, except slightly better or slightly faster.

That observation was made by some historian whose name escapes me at the moment when someone asked him how the hell we manage to create computers and it doesn't show in productivity numbers. He just said it takes time, sometimes even a lot of time, for people to figure out how there might be a new way to skin the cat.