Quote:
Originally Posted by ChargerCarl
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Luddite fears have always been misplaced in the past and I don't see any reason to think they'll be true this time.
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Luddites are actually a more complex case study than people realize. The reality was that the Luddites were basically just a hard-nosed labor union - they weren't anti-technology in general.
Even if the economic theory that new jobs will come from new industries is true over the long term, there is ample evidence that there can be decades, even generations of reduced employment between technological industries rising to replace ones automated into a point of diminished need of labor. If a person is employed for 20 years in an industry that then rapidly sheds jobs, but it will be another 10 years before there is enough demand for labor to absorb those "redundant" workers, it's a really sucky existence for those workers in that 10 year period.
I actually think that the traditional economic view that new industries provide demand for labor shed by highly-automated industries has (partly) relied on the fact that historically new industries were highly labor-intensive as how it worked was figured out. It took time for the automation to be engineered, and in that time people had jobs. What we're starting to see now, though, is new industries going from idea directly into highly-automated mode, with no labor-intensive growth/discovery period. That would make the future different from the past, if a large portion of new industries went from idea directly to full automation, with no learning curve to provide jobs. Robots and advanced modeling software enable that.
Essentially, automating things has always been a good source of jobs. But once we automate the task of automating, well, that's where basic income comes into need.