Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data • Hacker News Board

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#81

Post by blumkvist » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 6:16 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #75

blumkvist wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One teacher per 5 kids seems reasonable to me and will more than quadruple the kindergarten teachers. Homeschooling is a terrible idea as is, but more pedagogues will completely remove any logical reasons to even consider it. But why do you latch to the specific job i picked? More ecologists, more physicians, more nurses, more psychologists, more people in the creative industries. More people in the "caring" industri…

But...why? Why make up 'societal work', to keep people busy? Is it such a bad idea that folks should be able to choose their own lives, doing their own thing? For instance, I might never want to become a touchy-feely creative-industry person. What is there in this planned society for me? The trouble with this discussion is, that it starts assuming everybody must have a job . I disagree; that's the old pre-abundance v…

It is not made up work. Ultimately our job is to maintain a healthy eco system. This includes building a society that knows better than greed and decadence. Raising children who do not perceive themselves as rulers of the world.

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#82

Post by redblacktree » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

scotchmi_st wrote: post #40

adrianN wrote: post #3

Even if you accept that the trend of more jobs being created by technology than are being destroyed will continue indefinitely, fretting over technology replacing you if you're taxi driver is very justified. Having to learn a completely new trade is not easy.

Then again, no-one ever said that you could learn a trade at 20, and that trade would still be relevant when you're 40. If capitalism is something you agree with, then you must also accept the transitory nature of your work. Although personally I do agree we should try to make it easier for people in that position.

Given this, it's truly tragic when a young adult takes on a mammoth debt to learn a skill that is then made irrelevant.

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#83

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #54

prodmerc wrote: post #33

Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to. In 1900 people were still settling in America, and production has grown immensely worldwide at a steady rate since then, while population was relatively low. Now, population has grown three fold in the last hundred years: http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/1... There are more old people alive than ever before as a percentage of the overal…

> Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to. There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe. > we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money... We need to rethink how money is created and distributed. Once you do that, the need to "make money" might be lessened or re…

>There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.

You might want to re-think that. Places where people do not live are generally like that for a reason. How much fresh water is there? Do we really want to have more places on the planet under water stress? Do we want to ship water there? Is it hot as hell there? How much of a persons income is needed to survive with modern conveniences? What is the carbon cost of living there?

>We need to rethink how money is created and distributed.

That has to happen, but will it happen? For example, after the horse was replaced by the car, did we keep millions of horses around? No, there numbers dropped significantly. If technology can truly replace huge numbers of people, the people left with the capital may think that getting rid of huge portions of the population is a valid outcome. The truly scary thing is it may actually be a valid answer.

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#84

Post by Nadya » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

redblacktree wrote: post #82

scotchmi_st wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, no-one ever said that you could learn a trade at 20, and that trade would still be relevant when you're 40. If capitalism is something you agree with, then you must also accept the transitory nature of your work. Although personally I do agree we should try to make it easier for people in that position.

Given this, it's truly tragic when a young adult takes on a mammoth debt to learn a skill that is then made irrelevant.

It's unfortunate future-planning. It's impossible to know what the future holds but there is some level of precedent to help decide. Although with no guarantees, a job that has been around for hundreds of years is a bit more likely to stick around than a new job field that was just created 2 months ago.

I'd go in debt to become a carpenter before I went in debt learning a JS Framework, as an example.

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#85

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:20 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #49

minthd wrote: post #19

Looking at current uk employment numbers[1] , it seems that healthcare , education accommodation and food services count as 23% of the economy. But : 1. Will they grow under new conditions ? These sectors historically didn't enjoy more productivity due to technology. Economists called this "baumol's disease". But this is changing. We're seeing higher education and maybe some lower education being automated. In japan…

> 1. Will they grow under new conditions ? Some conditions don't change. An OAP with limited mobility will always require assistance day-to-day, and it's the sort of thing robots are really bad at. OAPs are also growing in number, as life expectation increases. Another one: you will always need someone to help give birth - in fact, as hospitals are deemed too expensive and scaled back, we will likely need more nurses…

>I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles to offset the bulk of those losses

In the U.S. we are creating software to get rid of those tasks. Yes, we'll hire a few programmers to make the software, and then cut 20 or 30 people out of an office. They don't get hired back. The company puts that money in the pocket of the owners. Every year the hardware and software gets cheaper to produce too.

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#86

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 7:42 PM UTC

bryans wrote: post #43

I think this article completely misses the point. The technological revolution happening right now is unlike any other in history, and is escalating faster than anyone realizes. We are really just entering the ascent of the S-curve, and things are already starting to advance dramatically on a yearly basis. Comparing the effects of technology between today and even 40 years ago (much less a century ago) is the epitome…

A rabbit in Australia, circa 1788.

The biggest issue with our era of technological growth, is we really have no idea if it is sustainable socially or ecologically over periods of time.

If we take human social structures out of current growth and look at the 'people like to work and create to survive issue as an individual' we can easily destroy the world around us. This occurs all the time in biological systems. The great oxygen catastrophe is a prime example. Each individual bacteria produced oxygen in order to survive. This worked fine for around a billion years. The bacteria had no means to realized that free iron and other rocks in the crust would absorb their byproduct only for so long. Once the saturation point was reached free oxygen filled the atmosphere and essentially poisoned the Earth for a time.

The question is, 'is there a technological saturation point'? How quickly will technology continue to grow even if it is poisoning the social structures it was built on? Will people and society adapt quickly enough?

Re: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

#87

Post by Asbostos » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

calibraxis wrote: post #55

dotcoma wrote: post #23

If true, is this good? Isn't the purpose of work to end (or to diminish, at least) all work? (and leave us with more time to take care of ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our kids, our parents, our friends, our neighbours, our politics, our environment etc)

Yes, this article's frame is horrific. Like a "glitch in the matrix" moment that illustrates something really wrong with our society, ridiculous ideologies which infect us all. "If there's ever a sign that a society is organized really stupidly, it's that the prospect that actual manual labor being eliminated is a problem. If we don't know what to do with freedom and liberty... that’s pretty messed up." ( https://www…

Yes, we have this weird notion that people "need" a job and "deserve" a job. But work is something people actually don't want! We might need or deserve an income, but not a job. I've worked hard to reduce the amount of work I have to do. Now I only work part time but I'm still in my 30's and have the same income as many other people my age. I hope to reduce that even further as time goes on.

If we really end up with nothing to do but desperately need to be forced to work, maybe forced labor camps would solve the problem