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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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We can beat the pension-based need for more people by vastly increasing productivity and ameliorating the effects of old age and/or automating more of the care of debilitated people
And how will this happen? The productivity growth has slowed down considerably and shows no signs of picking up, never mind "vastly increasing".
Well, there was at least one report suggesting that half of all jobs might be automated over the next two decades.
You are overstating the report's conclusions -- it said the "jobs might be at risk" which sounds to me like "we want to sound impressive but actually don't have anything to say".
I've paged through the report and wasn't impressed. For example (emphasis mine), "...First, together with a group of ML researchers, we subjectively hand-labelled 70 occupations, assigning 1 if automatable, and 0 if not. ... Our label assignments were based on eyeballing the O∗NET tasks and job description of each occupation." Essentially this a bunch of guesses and opinions with little support in the way of evidence.
Productivity, agreed.
Ameliorating the effects of old age, disagree - too many people treat retirement at 65 to be a God-given right for any real bump in the retirement age to solve things any time soon. Remember, this was an age set by Otto von Bismarck, and it's remained unchanged since - we've already had massive increases in quality of life for the elderly, and it's done nothing to improve the financial footings of the pension system(Quite the opposite, really).
Automating the care of the elderly will help some, but you're still left with extremely low workforce participation and a very high dependent ratio. That's not a pleasant situation, even if you don't need millions of people working in nursing homes.