Where Has Austerity Helped Restore an Economy to Health?

[Gumby]

But 100 years ago there were probably 99% fewer machines and 80% fewer humans, yet humans have kept their relevance so far (some would say we have even thrived)

Most of the machines over the past 100 years created brand new industries. But the current generation of robots are so advanced, they are now destroying jobs in those industries:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/no ... arehouses/

There's a big difference between a "machine" and a "robot". A machine is generally run by humans. A robot doesn't need a human to run it.

[MediumTex]

But 100 years ago there were probably 99% fewer machines and 80% fewer humans, yet humans have kept their relevance so far (some would say we have even thrived)

Most of the machines over the past 100 years created new industries. But the current generation of robots are so advanced (think ATMs), they are now destroying jobs:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/no ... arehouses/

Maybe this is just a "Lost Generation" of robots.

Perhaps their offspring will return to creating jobs for the humans.

I understand, however, that John Connor may have been right.  What is ironic, though, is that even in "The Terminator" narrative, the robots were still creating jobs for the humans, even though the job was as resistance fighters against the robots.

One thing that is sort of intriguing is the idea that there are machines "seeding" internet forums with certain ideas that the machines would like us to believe.  I used to be a moderator at another forum and any time a new member sounded too much like a "bot" I would ask them to share a funny story from their childhood.  It was mostly done in jest, but there were a few responses that were sort of disturbing for their "bot-ness" (I get the impression that robots struggle with subtle humor and historically appropriate cultural references). 

[Lone Wolf]

Most of the machines over the past 100 years created brand new industries. But the current generation of robots are so advanced, they are now destroying jobs in those industries:

I have two immediate (but opposing) thoughts when I read this sort of thing.

I'm first struck by how similar this is to the argument that the Luddites made when they were smashing up the looms.  It strikes me as a strange way to react to a tool.  For thousands of years, tools have freed humans from back-breaking, dangerous, or just plain mundane work.

The more productive capital that an individual worker is in command of, the higher that worker's wages are generally going to be.  A guy trying to plant corn with his bare hands isn't going to be profitable to employ at as high of a wage as a guy in command of a robot army of automated plows.

We don't owe our higher wages to unions or any inherent generosity on the part of employers.  We owe it to our tools.  (In fact, we owe just about everything to our tools.)

However, the nagging doubt that I can't let go of is the uncertainty about how the workforce at large will react to this kind of disruption.  I love the idea of living in a "world of the future" where I can have some robot do things that I find tiresome or uninspiring while I focus my limited time on the aspects of life that I really enjoy.

But there's this human sense of deep hostility toward extremely disruptive change.  As change accelerates, it means that humans have to adapt faster and faster to this ever-accelerating pace of change.  I don't yet know what this process looks like when you compress it.

I agree, though, that we should keep our eye on the machines.  It would be a shame if it turned out that we were the Neanderthals to the machines' Cro-Magnon as we move ever-closer to The Singularity.

I see us less being replaced by machines so much as enhanced by our machines.  I think that as time goes by, they'll become more and more a part of who we are, augmenting our abilities, enhancing our lifespans, and just generally turning us into better versions of ourselves.

This process is already well underway IMO.  For example, the way that I retain information today isn't remotely the same way that I did so in the pre-Google pre-Wikipedia era.  As machines bring humans more and more of what they crave (dramatically increased mobility into old age, longer lives, ultra-rich virtual experiences, even companionship), they'll just be more of what makes us who we are.

[MediumTex]

LoneWolf,

I sense a bit of jest in Gumby's overall approach to characterizing the machines' motives (though I may be just projecting my own sense of humor onto him).

What would you have said to a child working 12+ hour shifts in a dirty and drafty factory a hundred years ago if he told you through the Dickensian grime on his cheeks that the tools he was operating were not improving his lot in life in any way that he could understand?



You see, mista, me and my family's so poor that I can't even afford a bleedin' comb.  How do you like that for progress?  Sometimes I feel like one of the machines, except they don't take quite as good a care of me as they do the machines.  I'm also a lot easier to replace than the machines.

***

I think that the trick is to make sure that the march of technology and progress doesn't include the dehumanization of too many people in order to make the new and improved technological society operate smoothly.

It's interesting that you mention the accelerating pace of change and its effects on society.  Alvin Toffler wrote about this in "Future Shock" like 40 years ago.  It's ironic that he identified this potentially alienating dynamic so long before technology really started to move quickly.

[Lone Wolf]

What would you have said to a child working 12+ hour shifts in a dirty and drafty factory a hundred years ago if he told you through the Dickensian grime on his cheeks that the tools he was operating were not improving his lot in life in any way that he could understand?

I'd be sure to show him that I understood his Dickensian plight by giving him the ol' Dickensian "Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?" 

One thing that's interesting is that rural life was so hard that people willingly chose to move into the cities to live and work in these very rough conditions.

It's very hard for me to relate to this.  It's incredible that our society is now so wealthy that the average person is able to work in total comfort at an (often) rewarding occupation.  We go home to plentiful food and have access to a collection of knowledge that puts even the incredible Library of Alexandria to total shame.

[MediumTex]

What would you have said to a child working 12+ hour shifts in a dirty and drafty factory a hundred years ago if he told you through the Dickensian grime on his cheeks that the tools he was operating were not improving his lot in life in any way that he could understand?

I'd be sure to show him that I understood his Dickensian plight by giving him the ol' Dickensian "Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?" 

One thing that's interesting is that rural life was so hard that people willingly chose to move into the cities to live and work in these very rough conditions.

It's very hard for me to relate to this.  It's incredible that our society is now so wealthy that the average person is able to work in total comfort at an (often) rewarding occupation.  We go home to plentiful food and have access to a collection of knowledge that puts even the incredible Library of Alexandria to total shame.

When you combine the stored energy in the form of easily accessed fossil fuels with the incredible potential of the human mind where one generation can pass on all of its learning to successive generations, you do get a candle that emits a lovely light.

[Gumby]

I was half-joking. But, I think it's a bit naive to assume that there won't be consequences for automating everything. It's one thing to think of the farmer or factory owner who employs an army of robots to make him more profitable. That's wonderful. And it certainly employes a few engineers. But, what about the workers on the farm? I suppose they'll need to get an engineering degree to compete in this brave new world. Too bad tuition is through the roof.

[Gumby]

Ok... this is what I'm talking about:

Forbes: FoxConn to Replace Workers With Robots; Aim For One Million Robots In Three Years

So, Foxconn currently has about 1,000,000 workers (working in sweatshop conditions, earning less than $2/hour) and 10,000 robots. Next year they'll have 300,000 robots. In three years they will have 1,000,000 robots and most of those workers will be sent back home with no pay and no future. The CEO of Foxconn will make a lot of money, the workers will have no money.

But, Forbes points out something interesting...

Forbes: What Happens When Robots Replace Cheap Labor?

If robots take over the low-paying jobs in China, then someone could just as easily start a million-robot manufacturing company here in the United States. And that would impact both cheap labor and high-skilled labor in China.

But, the point is... imagine a world where cheap-labor doesn't exist. Is that utopia? Or does it create a poor, unskilled and unemployed lower class? Unless our education system is top-notch, not everyone in the world can be a highly-skilled laborer.

[stone]

I'm still thinking that wealth equality is what differentiates between technology increasing prosperity or creating poverty. If you own the factory full of robots then it is cool that you don't need to do that work that the robots are now doing. Something like an asset tax with a citizens dividend would mean that every one would be in that position of reaping the benefits of having the factory full of robots.
If you said to someone, in one of those ipod assembly factories, that they had been given a promotion and now had a combined job of "operations strategist/worker" and had a budget to buy a robot if they thought it sensible and that they would be paid a wage for life irrespective of whether they bought a robot and got another job/did something else or continued without the robot; then would many ipod assemblers choose to not buy the robot and to do the assembly by hand?

What I was meaning about universal affordability of oil being needed to create the need to develop alternatives:- Currently oil demand and production are matched because 6B of the 7B people on earth can not afford to consume it as we do. That means that it makes financial sense to fail to do the development work that would enable alternatives to fossil fuels to provide our energy. If everyone had equal access to oil then the high price of oil would mean that Goldman Sachs would not be able to out bid renewable energy developers when recruiting science graduates and ghost estate building in Ireland would not outbid for construction workers not to mention  people left unemployed. People grandly say that it is "uneconomic" to have people developing alternatives to fossil fuels and yet it makes "economic sense" to have banksters flying around in private jets, self importantly blowing bubbles. IMO that is simply an artifact of the fact that those who control money decide who does what and naturally they think that what they do (essentially play bingo) is supremely important. It is 100% politics, nothing to do with economics except in the sense that the political aims are mediated by financial means.

Imagine 100 people want to use oil but there is only enough supply for 20 people. Currently oil costs $100 per barrel and  renewable energy would become “economic to develop”? if oil was $200 per barrel.  If all 100 people were equally able to afford the oil, then the oil price would sky rocket to say $1000 and renewable energy would get developed.  The alternative is to ensure that oil stays at $100 per barrel  and that,  as supply falls, only 10 people can afford it, then only 5 people etc. All the people who could be developing the renewable energy are either unemployed or are involved in squanderous asset bubble schemes devised to create the wealth inequality that ensures that only a fraction of people can afford oil.

[Lone Wolf]

So, Foxconn currently has about 1,000,000 workers (working in sweatshop conditions, earning less than $2/hour) and 10,000 robots. Next year they'll have 300,000 robots. In three years they will have 1,000,000 robots and most of those workers will be sent back home with no pay and no future. The CEO of Foxconn will make a lot of money, the workers will have no money.

First, I do strongly agree with your point that unskilled labor is going to be placed in a tough spot by these trends.  This is a real issue.

The trouble is that your cast of characters is incomplete.  We all play a role in this story.  Someone designed and built these robots.  Someone gets to enjoy the savings provided by these machines (not just the CEO, but consumers.)  Lines of production that wouldn't have been reasonable before suddenly become profitable.  Prices lower and society gets more for less.

Every tool since the dawn of the industrial revolution has "killed jobs".  There have always been people predicting that these devices would create mass unemployment, yet such mass unemployment never materializes.  Where's the mass unemployment that the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age should have caused?  What's "special" this time around?

Abundance is what we're really after.  We work to have the things that we need and desire, not simply to have  jobs.  Robots aren't taking things from us -- they're creating that "abundance". It sort of reminds me of Bastiat's satirical petition from candlestick makers asking for sanctions against the sun.

I'm still thinking that wealth equality is what differentiates between technology increasing prosperity or creating poverty. If you own the factory full of robots then it is cool that you don't need to do that work that the robots are now doing. Something like an asset tax with a citizens dividend would mean that every one would be in that position of reaping the benefits of having the factory full of robots.

While I am (as you know) strongly against the idea of an asset tax, I think you've done a good job of zeroing in on the real issue.

Mass robotics can create structural unemployment among certain types of laborers.  That's not necessarily the same thing as "permanent unemployment" (and never has been in the structural unemployment caused by industrialization, the automobile, the internet, etc.), but there's always that part of you that wonders "What if?"

If the worst happens and we wound up with huge swaths of people that permanently had nothing to offer the economy, I think that we'd see something very much like a "citizen's dividend".

[stone]

Lone Wolf, do you agree that the judgement that certain people have nothing to offer the economy is very much formed in the context of wealth inequality? If we valued natural resources as we might if everyone had equal access to them, then sorting rubbish for reuse/recycling might be judged valuable labour. The value ascribed to child care and elderly care (including within your own family) is also hard to quantify. I think examples such as that run very deep through everything. I suspect that if everyone was given a citizens' dividend that they got irrespective of what they earned in addition; then many people would devise jobs for themselves (ie many more people would set up their own businesses) and also it would take high wages to persuade people to do stuff that seemed pointless to them. Also far more people would do informal work for neighbours, family etc.

To my mind if you can have a robot that can look after a toddler then you certainly will not need human robotics engineers because with robots that advanced, robots will be the best robotics engineers. Will we have robots that can write novels?

[Lone Wolf]

Lone Wolf, do you agree that the judgement that certain people have nothing to offer the economy is very much formed in the context of wealth inequality? If we valued natural resources as we might if everyone had equal access to them, then sorting rubbish for reuse/recycling might be judged valuable labour. The value ascribed to child care and elderly care (including within your own family) is also hard to quantify.

Sorry, I haven't really been following along too well on the discussions about natural resource valuation.

I think that your examples of child care and elderly care are very good, as their replacement via robot would likely take place in the far future (if at all.)  Recycling sorting, however, will present lots of opportunities for automation in the very near future.

To my mind if you can have a robot that can look after a toddler then you certainly will not need human robotics engineers because with robots that advanced, robots will be the best robotics engineers. Will we have robots that can write novels?

Right.  These would all be post-Singularity events so it's hard to predict what would happen in what order.

I think that if we reached this point, many people (particularly the wealth elderly or infirm) will be looking to move past their biological bodies.  People are never going to stop looking for immortality.  I think what you'll have in the future you describe are our cyborg descendants writing novels rather than robots.

[Lone Wolf]

When you combine the stored energy in the form of easily accessed fossil fuels with the incredible potential of the human mind where one generation can pass on all of its learning to successive generations, you do get a candle that emits a lovely light.

Great image.  While we probably don't agree on how many such candles are likely to be lit before the wick burns down, I think this is a good picture of what we are.  (Let's just try not to blow up the birthday cake before we see how the party turns out.)

It very well may wind up that you're right that humanity won't make the jump to that next candle.  If so, when you encounter me on that dusty post-apocalyptic desert highway, please just say "I told you so" instead of killing me for my leather chaps and gasoline. 

[moda0306]

We just need to bridge the gap to nuclear fusion and I think that will make solving a ton of other problems on top of energy ones much easier...

The problem is if society starts to break down in the face of skyrocketing fossil fuel prices instead of directing its efforts towards finding an alternative.

[stone]

moda, I don't understand the idea that fusion is somehow different from other forms of alternative energy except that it a form that totally doesn't work at the moment.

[moda0306]

It's theoretically almost infinitely efficient... unlike solar, wind, geothermal, or even nuclear (fission).

A little bit of hydrogen puts out a MASSIVE amount of energy.

It would make energy so cheap that we could spend more of our time concentrating on other problems and not digging for ways to heat our homes.

[stone]

Moda, what does it really mean to describe fusion as "almost infinitely efficient"? You get a lot of energy from a bit of deuterium but that is neither here nor there. What matters is how much human effort and irreplaceable resources are consumed for a given amount of energy. Fusion plants will always require best of the best engineers to build them. They will take plenty of fancy materials to build. Lets say fusion exceeds our wildest dreams and it only takes four plants dotted around the world to provide global energy. It will still take plenty of work to build the plants and replace them as they wear out and also to build the infrastructure required to use the electricity they generate. We already have a great fusion reactor at our disposal- it is called the sun. It takes work to harvest the energy it puts out but that is just as true for any fusion reactor we MIGHT be able to build ourselves. Also super fancy, super big things tend to go horribly wrong. I'd think it is much more robust to use lots of smaller, simple, idiot proof generators such as other renewables would entail.

[MediumTex]

It very well may wind up that you're right that humanity won't make the jump to that next candle.  If so, when you encounter me on that dusty post-apocalyptic desert highway, please just say "I told you so" instead of killing me for my leather chaps and gasoline. 

What I will likely say is: "At last!  I have finally found a friend in this wretched place."

This discussion, like many we have here, is impressive for its civility and seemingly effortless forward movement.  More and more I am convinced that before people even attempt to discuss controversial issues they should build some kind of rapport based upon shared interests and mutual respect.  For us here, there is the PP and its underlying premises that I think forms this basis for useful discussion of other issues. 

It sometimes discourages me when I see the way some people seem to build around themselves fortifications of beliefs without bothering to build a door in the event that they ever want to step outside for a breath of fresh air.  With so many beliefs to protect, an open discussion becomes harder and harder, to the point that someone who disagrees with a point of view can easily become a personal enemy, which is a really tragic thing. 

When, however, you have a foundation of shared interests and mutual respect, controversial issues can go from a burden to something like an intellectual feast, where the goal goes from defending your own turf to sampling as many kinds of turf as possible to understand why others believe as they do.  This way of looking at things is probably what makes an anthropologist's fieldwork very enjoyable--the anthropologist is not there to judge, but rather to study the structure of others' beliefs, how such beliefs are formed and the role they play in giving life coherence in a certain time and place.  IMHO, one can only emerge from such an experience better off.  Of course, if the anthropoligist discovers that part of the local folklore is that eating the meat of an anthropologist wards off evil spirits it might make sense for him to form the practical judgment that it would be a good idea to move on to the next tribe. 

[MediumTex]

It's theoretically almost infinitely efficient... unlike solar, wind, geothermal, or even nuclear (fission).

A little bit of hydrogen puts out a MASSIVE amount of energy.

It would make energy so cheap that we could spend more of our time concentrating on other problems and not digging for ways to heat our homes.

The thing that bothers me is that even if such a fantasy form of energy were ever to be perfected, there is still the problem of inattentive bureaucrats managing such systems and the potential catastrophes that could result from even a little negligence. 

I think that the facts about the nuclear power industry to date are not encouraging: First, we are 60 or so years into the nuclear power age and the problem of periodic core meltdowns and other system failures have still not been completely solved.  Second, we seem farther than ever from having any kind of long term strategy for storing nuclear waste.  If 60 years of human innovation has not solved these two fundamental problems with nuclear power, what does it say about the industry's long term viability as a scaleable alternative to fossil fuels?

To me, nuclear power is one more niche in the relatively small universe of alternatives to fossil fuels.

[moda0306]

MT,

I'm probably dreaming with fusion power.  I was more getting to the point that what we DO have will have to reliably get us to the various next steps into other energy, and not become so scarce as to cause societal breakdown (which would be counterproductive to reaching these improved technologies).

I can't imagine that somewhere in Mad Max world there were scientists in a bunker working on green energy.

[Lone Wolf]

This discussion, like many we have here, is impressive for its civility and seemingly effortless forward movement.  More and more I am convinced that before people even attempt to discuss controversial issues they should build some kind of rapport based upon shared interests and mutual respect.  For us here, there is the PP and its underlying premises that I think forms this basis for useful discussion of other issues.  
...
When, however, you have a foundation of shared interests and mutual respect, controversial issues can go from a burden to something like an intellectual feast, where the goal goes from defending your own turf to sampling as many kinds of turf as possible to understand why others believe as they do.

I completely agree.  It provides a lot of momentum being able to start every discussion knowing that the other people involved are very likely to be thoughtful, respectful, gracious and intellectually curious.  You can just talk instead of defend whatever meme thinks it's entitled to your mental energy and firepower.

Kind of like the opposite of starting up discussions like these on a Youtube comment thread.  :)

[moda0306]

I also notice that people that have tried to start a ruckus in the past usually fade away pretty quick.  The natural flow of our discussions tends to make obnoxious interruptions stand out like a sore thumb.

[Gumby]

First, I do strongly agree with your point that unskilled labor is going to be placed in a tough spot by these trends.  This is a real issue.

That's what I'm talking about. What happens to unskilled labor? There's no work for them. No way for them to work up from the mailroom to the CEO's office.

The trouble is that your cast of characters is incomplete.  We all play a role in this story.  Someone designed and built these robots.  Someone gets to enjoy the savings provided by these machines (not just the CEO, but consumers.)  Lines of production that wouldn't have been reasonable before suddenly become profitable.  Prices lower and society gets more for less.

I have never denied that robots will make my own career and life better. I look forward to powering my own army of robots. And I look forward to the day that I can buy a $40 iPhone that wasn't built by a Chinese sweatshop worker.

But please, it only takes a small team of designers and engineers to produce a million-robot army.

Every tool since the dawn of the industrial revolution has "killed jobs".  There have always been people predicting that these devices would create mass unemployment, yet such mass unemployment never materializes.  Where's the mass unemployment that the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age should have caused?  What's "special" this time around?

What's special this time around is that we are essentially creating a second intelligent species that can compete with the human mind and body. That's never happened before.

See: Wired: Brainy Robots To Lead To Longer Unemployment Lines?

The fact is that if you have millions and millions of robots who work tirelessly on auto-assembly lines, delivering packages on long-haul truck-routes, quickly taking orders at McDonald's (via TouchScreen or iPhone app), cooking fast-food meals, efficiently restocking shelves at Walmart, building electronic devices, driving taxis (as seen in Total Recall), cleaning homes, harvesting on farms, enforcing law and security (as in RoboCop)...all without needing any benefits or 401Ks, it will have an enormous impact on an entire class of citizens who depend on those jobs.

That will translate to massive unemployment for those who depended on those low-skilled, entry-level jobs. Massive. Not all of those auto workers, truck divers, factory workers, taxi drivers, retail shelf stockers, McDonald's crew, farm-hands, Cops and security personnel will get jobs at iRobot. Not everyone can go to school to become an engineer.

This idea that most of those people will be able find new jobs is pretty ridiculous. Even if they do find jobs, it will only make high-skilled jobs more difficult to attain as more people fight for the remaining human jobs.

While Luddites were the first to worry about this back in the early 1800s — and have been proven wrong ever since — it seems that there is evidence that we may be starting to see a change in the way robots affect structural unemployment:

From Wikipedia:

Today automation is quite advanced (relative to just a few lifetimes ago), and it continues to advance with an accelerating pace throughout the world. Although it has been encroaching on ever more skilled jobs, the general well-being and quality of life of most people in the world (where political factors have not muddied the picture) have improved. Clearly a multivariate effect has been at work (something much more than just the obvious idea that automation has the potential to cause unemployment). In fact, the idea that automation posed an imminent threat to employment, first articulated in 1811 by a group of textile workers known as Luddites, has proven to be so fallacious over the ensuing two centuries that economists call the imminent-threat idea the Luddite fallacy.

There is some concern today that the economy's ability to continue absorbing ever-increasing automation without experiencing significant structural unemployment may be heading toward an upper limit—that is, that we are approaching a point where the Luddite premise will no longer be entirely fallacious, because the relationship of humans to machines that made it fallacious is changing. In this view, the empirical strength of the eternal-fallaciousness idea is only a reflection of the parameter values of the environment thus far. In other words, the idea is undoubtedly an excellent explanation of the past, but whether it can accurately predict the future is an independent problem. Like an investment prospectus, proponents of this view caution that "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

...

Since the 1990s, the possibility has been raised again in even an apolitical, technocratic way that the Luddite premise (that automation creates unemployment) was only fallacious in the absence of highly advanced and ubiquitous automation, which until recently was mostly out of reach technologically. This would explain why it has always been fallacious until now, but also why it might not always remain so. For example, Marshall Brain, Martin Ford, and others have suggested that exponentially accelerating information technology (IT) may ultimately result in widespread structural unemployment, because an implicit assumption underlying the "eternally fallacious" idea (that lots of regular humans will always find ways to do service work that machines can't do) will itself be fallacious as IT advances. They suggest that, unlike in the 20th century, when the tertiary sector absorbed all of the workers that the automation of the secondary sector expelled, the tertiary sector now also faces depopulation via automation; its employment will shrink, not grow, and this time there is no other sector to backstop the process by absorbing the displaced workers. The high unemployment rates of the late-2000s recession have brought the idea of structural unemployment back into mainstream attention, as observations are made about positions that require extensive specialized skill and experience standing long vacant even while general unemployment rates above 9% (and horror stories of fruitless job searches) would seem to suggest that such vacancies ought to be scarcer. The idea that automation has finally advanced to the point that the Luddite premise is no longer entirely fallacious is one of the components of some theoretical explanations for the string of jobless recoveries in developed economies in recent decades. Expectations that the (already eroding) fallaciousness will fall off sharply in coming decades underlie the fear of structural shift.

...

What would happen during an intermediate era when robots and other AI were mediocre but still fairly useful, and income still depended on having a job—that is, selling one's labor? Would the market value of that labor be depressed? Clearly total production (gross domestic product) could grow ever higher in this world; but how would money circulate? Would a large underclass of humans have no way to partake of the output, having no employment? Or would something happen (perhaps something we cannot foresee) that would cause a different scenario? Attempts to answer these questions have been made, as outlined below.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment

The Wikipedia article goes on to explain the different theories of how those questions might be answered. Interesting stuff

Read more on those possible outcomes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment

By the way... here's what long term unemployment looks like in American today:

[align=center][/align]

...now re-read the part of the quote, above, highlighted in bold:

...The high unemployment rates of the late-2000s recession have brought the idea of structural unemployment back into mainstream attention, as observations are made about positions that require extensive specialized skill and experience standing long vacant even while general unemployment rates above 9% (and horror stories of fruitless job searches) would seem to suggest that such vacancies ought to be scarcer. The idea that automation has finally advanced to the point that the Luddite premise is no longer entirely fallacious is one of the components of some theoretical explanations for the string of jobless recoveries in developed economies in recent decades....

Many of those lower-skill jobs are never coming back and its clearly causing problems in our society. The effects of automation is clearly something to consider during this jobless recovery.

[MachineGhost]

No, but it creates a world where the living standard for everyone is dramatically higher than it is now.  Wealth disparity gaps are red herrings because the utility of wealth rapidly decreases after the first dollar and is virtually meaningless past $30K.  When literally everyone is as effectively rich as Solomon in real wealth terms, the concept of value will shift to other concepts than scarce physical resources from supernovas.  That is because humans ultimately want to be happy, not wealthy.

I think the movie WALL-E is in some ways prophetic. 

MG

But, the point is... imagine a world where cheap-labor doesn't exist. Is that utopia? Or does it create a poor, unskilled and unemployed lower class? Unless our education system is top-notch, not everyone in the world can be a highly-skilled laborer.

[Gumby]

When literally everyone is as effectively rich as Solomon in real wealth terms, the concept of value will shift to other concepts than scarce physical resources from supernovas.  That is because humans ultimately want to be happy, not wealthy.

Right. A post-scarcity utopia, or dystopia. I get it....

In the meantime the number of terminally unemployed citizens has skyrocketed (see chart above). Many of those jobs are never coming back.