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Manufacturing in the US has been way up for awhile, and with way less people.
There was a thread here with a guy saying how great it was that X company was buying millions in new equipment, a MAGA moment for him. He didn't seem to get that the machines were going to do the jobs of the workers.
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if workers became more productive the management keeps it because "brilliant minds of management made this possible"
this is why we have politicos experimenting with a minimum income "free" now...and judging by conservative reaction its NOT going well...
a decision will have to be made between FEMA type internment camps and a minimum income..which is cheaper??
probably need to restict birthrate as well...another hard sell lol
A machine lets 1 person do what, say, 5 people used to do.
This lets 1 person produce the output that 5 people used to do. That is why the wealth of the worker will go up.
The usual retort is that the other 4 people will be out of work. But you're forgetting that the 1 person will have 5 times the income of the old person. As a result of this increased income they will be able to consume more. Due to this increased consumption, they will create more demand for goods and services that will necessitate need for more labor. That is what the other 4 people will be doing.
Now, what holds true for that first, one person will in turn be true of the other 4 people. Thanks to machines, robotics, etc., they will be able to do what 5 people used to do, and the cycle created by the first person will also be true for these other four.
Furthermore, since this machinery, robotics and AI will decrease the need to do harder, menial tasks in addition to creating greater wealth and productivity, the jobs created for the other 4 people will be increasingly geared toward serving the wants of people, not the needs of people. This is part of what I meant when I said, "Greater income & wealth will give people more time to enjoy life and do things we want to do, rather than things we have to do."
I might be exaggerating a bit here, but imagine a future society in which people can earn enough money to buy a nice house, a nice car, and have 4 weeks' vacation by working just 30 hours a week. They will produce all this wealth for themselves by "hiring" machines, robots, AI and all kinds of other technologies to do much of their work for them.
All this wealth, and all that extra free time, will give them the resources to travel a lot, have lots of time for hobbies, engage in spirituality, or whatever else makes them happy. They might even have time to have more kids (I can actually back that up with a recent trend, but it's another topic). This will create demand for people engaged in serving people who like to travel, do hobbies, teach children, etc etc. Each of those people engaged in those occupations, in turn, will have a bevy of technologies at their disposal to make them much more productive and wealthy as well. That is, you will get people building cruise ships who are 5 times more productive than cruise ship builders of yore used to be. You will get restaurant workers who are 5 times more productive than restaurant workers of yore used to be. And so on.
In other words, ultimately it won't just be the 1 person who becomes vastly more productive and wealthy due to technology while the other 4 are out of luck, it will eventually be the other 4 people as well.
The bolded is where you are mistaken. Everything in your post that stems from that incorrect assumption is flawed. A surplus of labor (i.e. too many workers for the # of jobs available) has a detrimental effect on wages.
That's true as well. At some point in the future, 1 robot maintenance person will be able to do the work that 5 robot maintenance people in Days of Yore used to do. At which point that 1 robot maintenance person will be incredibly productive and, thus, wealthy. The remaining 4 workers will then do tasks that serve the increased wants and capabilities of the 1 robot maintenance worker.
The ultimate end game of this will be a society in which robots and AI will cater to nearly all our becks and calls, and we need do nothing more than sit at the poolside, sipping margaritas and pressing a few buttons to tell the robots what to do.
Let's just hope the robots don't get so smart that they start to rebel against their human overlords.
No I'm afraid you are mistaken: There is nothing in my scenario that says or implies there will be a surplus of labor.
One person doing the job of 5 people means 5 people competing for the same job. That is a labor surplus, and leads to a situation where an employer will not have to pay the same wage they would with a smaller labor pool.
The idea that the one person who got the job would make 5x as much as before is laughable. If the one person did make more, it would surely not be enough to offset the wages lost by the other four. After all, the employer is automating to reduce labor costs.
People who say computers won't replace people don't know the origin of the term "computer".
There is no magic law that says innovation always creates more jobs. If the technology is better at a certain cognitive task, machines will perform that task from here on out. And the more tasks computers can perform, the fewer economic niches there will be for people.
Won't someone please think of the children in those foreign sweatshops that will be left without a job?
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