We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

We've picked all the low hanging fruit - in technology and resources.

Our cars haven't really change much in 100 years. Same basic engine, just added computers (we did that in the _1970'_).

We're only incrementally improving technology (cars with navigation).

Our current innovations (Twitter, FB, Google) don't produce many jobs and in fact reduce number of jobs. People will spend the night on FB vs going out to dinner, a movie, etc. You don't need to go out to cure boredom/socialize.

Also, Social websites don't produce much commercial activity (compared to say the automakers building Detroit into a first tier city in the last century).

We're patenting one click check outs, but we haven't found a good (economical at scale) replacement for the major components of our economy - e.g. the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels.

The US has has an abundance of cheap land an resources PLUS the country was lucky enough to grow up in the industrial revolution when technical innovation was relatively easy and world changing (compared to now where it's much more incremental).

We're going to stagnate until someone (US,Chinese,Indian,other) makes some big leaps in alternative energy and other advanced technology.

Web apps aren't going fix our economic problems (however useful they are).

Ford, and every other company, ran a 48 hour work week in the united states until Ford decided his factories were efficient enough that he could hire more people, pay everyone the same for 8 hours less labor, and thus sell more cars. Most every industry followed.

Now we've nearly a tenth of the workforce unemployed, but the story people tend to ignore is the actual hours of employment demanded per capita. The far scarier story than the United states unemployment is its underemployment, where people are willing to work but only get a few hours. Employers want to employ more people...but they can't fill more labor-hours. They can split those hours up, and because of that, a lot of the job loss is hidden.

Does anyone know of any other animals losing their jobs to robots?

Sure, there will be people at the top of the command hierarchy dictating what needs are being met. That doesn't mean that spec-writing jobs will provide gainful employment for as many people as are employed fulfilling specs these days.

As for why it will be any easier to write the spec than the program, it already is. "Plain language" is exactly how people spec things out all the time these days, it serves me quite well when I'm getting work assignments ("The Fizzle button is making the back end Furble on Tuesday nights, fix it!", or "Add a coupon code field to our order page and an administration tab to add codes to the database - just make sure the same code can't be used more than once").

Idealistic people try to write legal contracts in plain language, but it doesn't work.

People tell their lawyers in plain everyday language what they care about achieving with a legal contract, and the lawyers fill in the blanks based on what they know. Similarly, normal people tell their programmers what they care about achieving, the programmers fill in the blanks. Sure, we can't automate that filling-in-the-blanks super well yet, and yes, there often has to be some back and forth to figure out what the person really wants (this is, IMO, on of the most important things missing in a lot of machine learning approaches, as human thought - especially language processing - involves a lot of feedback between systems and backtracking), but to me it's not hard at all to imagine all of that being extremely successfully automated once we have thirty years more NLP research under our belts and laptop computers that would put the most expensive Hadoop cluster you could construct today to shame...

Then again, I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that the "problem" of intelligence can be solved by a much less sophisticated algorithm than the one that our brains implement, under the theory that typically evolution only ever seems to do one thing well: create highly complex solutions to medium difficulty problems.

That's a ridiculous argument...and remember, the example was ridiculous, talking about a world where only 10% of people had jobs: People would build -very difficult- things to find employment. (incidentally, we're all of us doing harder(cognitively) things than our ancestors to find employment today.)