Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

So I do not give a rats arse about 'productivity', and neither does anybody else, what we want is to live in paradise, today.

Paradise, for me, is when I can have all of the below as a matter of basic human convenience, 'free' as we call it now in the age of want:

* min 4000 calories of excellent and varied nutritious food whenever I want it

* 1kl of 60℃ water / day to my exclusive disposal, I will generally lie around in it

* 1l of alcoholic beverage, typically high hopped beer, I'm not fussy

* sex on demand with a like minded individual, I'm not fussy, hotness would be nice but I'll be happy with someone less ugly than me

* I want to be able travel to any place in the solar system that humans have built homesteads, on demand, by getting on the nearest bus to Titan

* I want to live as long as I please, in excellent health until life literally bores me to death and I decide to die of some ancient crippling disease as an expression of art, or some other bullshit like that.

Now, if I can have the above, you may own all the AI and tech you want, no worries.

My main question while reading this article was why is the author so stuck on "manufacturing" jobs being automated away? He does address this very briefly in section III but I cannot help but feel his foundational research is highly skewed.

Sure, robotics are growing in popularity and that technology, specifically, will likely impact manufacturing. Comparatively speaking, however, industrial robots are very expensive. Only the larger manufacturers are going to be upgrading plants with multi-million dollar (or very, very recently hundreds of thousands) equipment to replace a few hundred workers each (if that?).

Fun fact: ~90% of the 5.7 million companies in the US had fewer than 20 employees in 2012. 50% of working Americans were employed by companies of fewer than 500 (source of questionable quality: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/us-employment-by-firm-siz...).

Compare all that to search results for "images of 1950s offices". You get photos of rows and rows of desks of identical configurations - people with paper pads, typewriters or tabulation machines. Look at what all these people are doing. They are accounting departments calculating statements and balance sheets by hand. They are typists writing out form letters one at a time. These are the job categories that have been wiped out in their entirety by spreadsheets and word processors that you can get literally for free. The CEO can do the work of that 1950s accounting department by herself in an hour.

Where did those jobs go? I don't know how many there were to start but it looks significant.

Yes, modern offices have the same configurations but it is fundamentally different. The companies I work in can have an entire business unit (or company!) working out of an office that size. One person at one desk is an entire marketing department, the next person is HR (including payroll/accounts/bookkeeping). The only rows of homogeneous roles you see these days are the grunts building the technology.

In conclusion, I get the feeling a lot of people wondering if jobs are disappearing seem to be suffering from a bit of "out of sight, out of mind". Most of the automated jobs are already gone.

Just my thoughts.

Of course it can. You don't even have to go nano. Give me a team of people from Boston Dynamics for a year, and I guarantee you they'll be able to make me a wearable exoskeleton that is better at throwing the ball on-target than the best NBA player.

It's just, like GP said, with such tech allowed, "the entertainment and spectator aspect would fall away". Sport disciplines are designed to ensure scarcity of good athletes.