What if technology is destroying jobs faster than it is creating them?

Yes, it is, and I think it’s a ship that has sailed.

Highly unlikely. Efficiency improvements almost always seem to lead to more employment and more wealth for all of us. You just can’t see all the jobs being churned, so it is difficult to tell what is really going on in an economy until years later.

Knowledge workers in most professions will be prized forever. And I portend that what we’ve traditionally called “the trades” will need skilled workers. I truly haven’t clicked on your links (please don’t beat me), but I am involved in a profession which is redefining roles for its highly skilled knowledge workers.

Maybe bad unions killing off more jobs and sending them overseas than those replacing them.

So many jobs have disappeared because of robotization and other inventions. It’s never mentioned when politicians discuss the job market. Secretarial pools are now smaller puddles because of the speed of computers. Machines doing farm work took away jobs from farms. Every time I see new machines or inventions, I wonder how many jobs were lost. It’s progress, but there are definitely changes in our society because of them; loss of jobs being the primary one.

There is a movement you can join that shares your concerns.

With the industrial revolution, people felt like jobs were being destroyed. Thousands of farmers were out of work, etc.

In the short run, bad stuff happened, large numbers of people had to be displaced to find new roles in the economy.

In the long run, however, our economy has not been destroyed by the industrial revolution. To the contrary, the industrial revolution helped to dramatically increase our PPP (purchasing power parity).

That is sort of similar to what is going on now. People with more traditional jobs are losing work, but eventually people will just find new roles in the economy.

It’s pretty common in some industries. In my lifetime, construction in India has frequently been done by a parade of women and other low-status workers carrying small loads of concrete in containers balanced on their heads, for example, walking a path to the form being filled, dumping their “head” of concrete, and then walking another path to be refilled.

One concrete truck and a nearby batch plant can put 100 or more women “out of work”. But as you might imagine, in an economy as impoverished as that, there is always more work to be done. So even though I could probably not find a construction job like that in India any more, clearly the nation has gotten richer because of not “in spite of” those types of productivity improvements – which put people out of work.

There is always work to be done. The problem is that, in an example such as the one I gave, what else are those 100 concrete carriers qualified to do? It takes a while to train people to do more than simply “fetch and carry”, so transitions from one job to another can be wrenching on an individual basis… but the economy as a whole, and over time, improves because of those losses of low-skill jobs.

@Hypocrisy_Central Unions don’t send jobs overseas. Unions protect and represent the workers.

It happened in my industry. Total staff in the stock exchange industry with a limited number of trading floors was around 25,000 nationally. It’s now down to under 1,500. That includes all the traders.

That’s not really happening. But if it did, there’s more free time for unpaid creativity. In fact, this is what happened in the history of our species. Because of new technology such as the wheel, people had more time to think about the next invention. It triggered a chain reaction.

It is an unfortunate truth. However maintenance will always be need, so there will be at least a few jobs for people. But it doesn’t have to be negative, this would allow humanity to focus on other things, more important things.

You know the sign wavers that stand on street corners when stores are going out of business or having a huge sale? I saw an automated one yesterday. A manikin wearing a dress and a wig, with some motor to wave the arms that were holding a sign.