This is required watching for all parents. What happens when there are more people than the number of jobs we can create?
If automation and robotics create a labor environment where all business needs can be met with 60% of the population, then how do we expect the remaining 40% to survive and grow?
Past – new jobs with pre-existing skills
It is true that new technology always ushered in new types of jobs for different kinds of labor. However, all of those new kinds of jobs used pre-existing skills.
The Internet created an entire new industry, but all of the jobs in those industries still use the same reading, writing, and cognitive abilities we have used for hundreds of years. The manufacturing and assembly of computers and other technological goods still use the same assembly-line manufacturing skills that watchmakers used at the turn-of-the-century.
We have always taken solace in the fact that as our technological discoveries made certain jobs obsolete, other types of jobs were created to replace those.
Current – automation replaces skills
What many don’t realize is that automation replaces human skills, not human jobs. That’s a key difference. Because if you can replace human skill and physical labor with robotics, then any new type of job created in the future can be completed by a “robot”.
At first glance this sounds like a recipe for disaster. It looks like a downward spiral in which fewer and fewer people have jobs. And in turn, fewer and fewer people can afford products and services in a Capitalist economy.
The key to moving forward will be our ability to evolve and adapt our view of what it means to live in a modern technologically advanced economy.
Future – the changing dynamics of modern economics
As the video highlights, over the last 100 years the Agricultural industry has required less workers to produce the same amount of food. And that trend is spilling over to other industries. Other industries that we typically would not see opportunities for automation. Doctors, Lawyers, and other knowledge workers are no longer immune to the level of automation experienced in the Agricultural industry.
What does it mean to us as a society, when all of the products and services we need no longer require a human to produce?
It will mean that for the first time in human civilization, people no longer have to work to survive. All of human basic needs, such as food, shelter and healthcare, will be satisfied at little or no cost. That is actually not a problem.
The problem is that before we get to that state, there will be significantly more people than there are jobs available. And how do we manage that transition when 30% or 50% of the worlds population does not have a job to earn a living.
Not because they do not want a job, but because there is literally no job to have.