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CoffeeStain comments on Norbert Wiener on automation and unemployment - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
Take Uber, Sidecar, and Lyft as examples. I can't find any data, but anecdotally these services appear to reduce the cost, and increase the wages, for patrons and drivers respectively by between 20 and 50%, with increased convenience for both. You know it's working when entrenched, competing sectors of the industry are protesting and lobbying.
Eliezer's suggestion about forgotten industries (maids and butlers) seems much more on point if automatic markets can remove hiring friction. Ride sharing has a rapidly-converging rating system that, with high-success, pairs drivers and riders, a paradigm that seems like it could succeed elsewhere with (if slow) changes in legality and public perception. Twenty years ago it would have nothing but incredible to not hold in your hand items costing a month's wage before buying them and waiting two days for them to appear on your doorstep. If there's a coming analogous revolution for the workforce, it could be even shorter, which puts it far out of reach of major AGI advances.
Er... mail-order is old. Very old. Like, ordinary farmers in the Midwest would easily send off to Montgomery Ward orders for hugely expensive things like farming equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_order#Ward:_mail_order_pioneer :
Unless of course you were putting your emphasis on 2-day mailing. I suspect Ward couldn't sell you a new house and deliver it in 2 days.