M S
M S
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Although you are correct in predicting the immense and intense imapct that AI/automation will have on our society, your apparent lack of a fundamental economics understanding is skewing your view towards impossible conclusions. Here is the start of the divergence:

<blockquote> Free market capitalists like to appease themselves with the fairy tale that automation will open up new employment possibilities we never could’ve anticipated which will somehow magically fill the entire droid void… </blockquote>

This is a Strawman combined with a False Dilemma. If any ‘free market capitalists’ actually think that employment will come solely from yet to be discovered new areas, they are also lacking economics skills. The reason is that all work performed AND THE VALUE THEREOF is relative. This means that if you had an economy where people only valued two goods (widgets n fidgets), and one of those goods (widgets), all the sudden, required no human labor to produce, then its value would drastically decline relative to the value of the other goods in the market (in this case, fidgets). How this relates to your statement is that as jobs for humans become more scarce in one sector, all the remaining sectors will become more valuable and the demand for labor in those areas will increase. So, as news journalism might become more scarce, massage therapists might become more in demand and higher paying. The economy will look totally different than today, and the value of all the jobs available will adjust to reflect the new state of affairs: we could ALL be massage therapists if AI/Automation did all the other labor to produce everything else we desired. In such a case there would be a wide variety of differing massage therapy offered, from low-skilled/low-paying to high-skilled, specialized, high-paying jobs. More importantly, the benefits of automation/AI will flow through to the average person through the pricing system. In my above example where everything is provided by automation and we are all massage therapists, we might only have to work an hour or two a month doing such a job in order to maintain the high standard of living that we experience today!

The other thing that is important to remember is that humans have an UNLIMITED desire for things — once we make cars ‘for free’, then we want something else, and so on. ‘Jobs’ are created by being able to fulfill these desires. This means that there will ALWAYS be an unlimited opportunity for work, unless something gets in the way. That ‘something’ is always the restrictive force of government.

So, yes, BIG change is coming and what is needed is for our labor market to be as flexible and fluid as possible to adjust to these upcoming and significant job changes. It will become less and less likely that a person will be able to learn one skill and expect to be employed using that single skill for their entire life. People will need to constantly educate and improve their skillset, perhaps changing ‘jobs’ as much as a few times per year! This means that frictional unemployment (the period of time between jobs) will become a MAJOR issue and our current unemployment safety net will need to be eradicated because it encourages unemployment and extends the period of time unemployed.

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    M S

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    M S