On the other side, I'm frustrated by people failing to understand that technological progress creates new jobs in the process of destroying old ones, and that this is a net good, even though the people losing their jobs are the most visible.
Is this thing still considered obvious these days? The problem with it is that the new jobs that still need people to do them are getting more difficult. We seem to have actually viable self-driving cars now, which hints that just needing to do hand-eye coordination in diverse environments no longer guarantees that a job needs a human to do it.
If we ever get automated natural language interfaces to be actually good, that's another massive sector of human labor, customer service, who just got replacable with a bunch of $10 microprocessors and a software license. So, do we now assure everyone that good natural language interfaces will never happen, even though self-driving cars obviously were never going to work in the real world either, except that now they appear to do?
At least the people in high abstraction knowledge work can be at peace knowing that if automation ever gets around to doing their jobs better than them, they probably don't need to worry very long about unemployment on the account of everybody probably ending up dead.
There's a lot of status quo bias here. Once upon a time, elevators and telephones had operators, but no longer.
The problem with it is that the new jobs that still need people to do them are getting more difficult.
This is an important fact, if true. There are obvious lock-in effects. For example, unemployed auto workers have skills that are no longer valued in the market because of automation. But the claim that replacement jobs are systematically more difficult, so that newly unemployed lack the capacity to learn the new jobs, is a much stronger claim.
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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