marshallbrain.com — In 2055 the nation hit a big milestone -- over half of the American workforce was unemployed, and the number was still rising. Nearly every "normal" job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was filled by a robot instead.
Jul 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
swcarsonJul 11, 2006
Economic ignorance abounds in this piece. There is not some fixed pie of jobs such that any innovation in efficiency removes jobs from the pie leaving less jobs for everyone. if this were the case then the improvements in farming that eliminated 90% of the population from farming jobs would have resulted in 90% of the population being unemployed. They're not. They found other things to do. Until humans run out of goods and services that they want there will always be work to do. Widespread use of robots would not make everyone unemployed, they would instead free up and empower human labor to take on new challenges.
walterd93Jul 11, 2006Submitter
Did you read the article?"What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population. "
skyorbitJul 17, 2006
It's a dumb article.If Robots automated 60% of the things we do now -- along with many of the more productive things we learn how to do in the future. Stuff would be dirt cheep. Paying for Labor is the biggest expense typically in the production of goods. That means that if the amount of labor require to produce goods when down by 75%. You can bet that prices would probably be 75% cheaper if not more.What does that mean? It means the 2 hour work-day and the 10 hour work-week of the Jetsons. And only needing 1 breadwinner in a family of 4 or so to live quite extravagantly. (Middle Class for the era but still quite wealthier then the average middle class is now.) Now, some people would specialize in fixing robots. Those people would probably get paid enormous amounts of money. But there would be jobs for other people to do too -- maybe not nearly as many -- but you don't need nearly as many. See.The_Attempted_Militarization_of_the_Jetsons<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/business_finance/The_Attempted_Militarization_of_the_Jetsons">http://digg.com/business_finance/The_Attempted_Militarization_of_the_Jetsons</a>From <a class="user" href="http://www.mises.org/story/1920">http://www.mises.org/story/1920</a>These other people are right too though. There isn't any fixed amount of jobs.Tracy