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

> Average personal savings rates in India and China was: 30% and 50%

Yes, but if you take into account the 9% inflation in India, the savings might be a net loss.

As was pointed out to me earlier in another HN discussion, the only reason why the Indian government guarantees a seemingly too good to believe interest rate of 9% for the savings accounts of their senior citizens is because that rate cancels out inflation.

> Short answer: technology destroys jobs for dumb people and creates jobs for smart people.

It sounds like you're only considering high-tech jobs, like computer programmers or engineers. Those aren't all the jobs that technology creates, not by a long shot. Think about pizza deliverers, call center workers, fast food workers, etc.

Elaborate? You're being vague, and from what I've seen we have no problems with the capital we produce.

The efficiency of our production is rising for centuries indeed. Once, a peon on a field could hardly produce for his own family, a modern day farmer can supply food for thousands of people.

Same can be seen in almost all industries.

For centuries this trend was offset with appearance of new kinds of production. New fields opened new markets and new places for work.

Lets ignore the current situation and ponder where does it lead us. It is inevitable that in the future most of day-to-day stuff we use will be produced by robots with minimal up to none human oversight.

There is only that much that we can consume. There is only that much of different kinds of produciton we can require. And we can not all be working in a creative capacity, inventing new stuff and inventing new markets. Inavitably a day will come when it will be technologically possible to supply all day-to-day the needs of world's population with stuff and services supplied mostly by robots.

What will happen then?

From several hundreds years ago, when people produced mostly for themselves, to the distant future when we all be serviced by robots and efficient production chains we see a definite trend. Somewhere along the path there should be disruptive events for this to happen, when a 'tension' produced by efficiency leads to massive losses of jobs.

For most of the time during the whole history the argument "it is not different then the previous time it happen" will be valid, but there will be definitely times it wont be the case. And it is possible that now is one of those times. Rise in effeciency must lead to loss of jobs eventurally. May be the time is now.

Oh, and this future is not necesserily a very dark one. After all, having most stuff produced effectively only means that most of the population will not have to work. Mey be it will lead to large portion of the population being a "dead weight", burning their life in leasure, and small energetic minority engaging in moving us forward, I don't know. May be it will lead to a large production 'surplus' that we will use to colonize the solar system and beyond? May be something else...

But I think we need to start thinking of what the society will look like when most people will not have to work to lead a decent life? What incentives will we need to invent to still have enough people to move forward? How to prevent degradation? I don't think artificial limits on automation and technology is the answer, but we might eventually come to this. I can see a politician introducing a SaveTheJobsBill to outlaw massively automated factories. We need to start thinking about it now, before it actually happens.

Although the world population has more than doubled from the middle of the twentieth century, technology has doubled many times more, and continues to at a much faster rate than our rate of consumption and reproduction. This exponential increase means that is only a matter of time until the efficiency of technology overtakes the amount of jobs that a society needs to produce more than it needs.

Technology will net kill jobs someday if it isn't already. It remains to be seen whether that is happening now, or if this unemployment is just the symptom of a country that has borrowed too much.