OrphanWilde comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong Discussion
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Job destruction isn't a mystery to you - you've identified the central cause as automation (there are other causes, but let's not get hung up on them too much). Is it fair to say that job creation -is- a mystery to you - given that you haven't identified a central cause of job creation?
It's true: I don't know how to predict job creation. Some new kinds of jobs are obviously enabled or required by new technology. But many (most?) changes are either socially or politically driven and so very hard to predict.
So it might be that enough jobs for everyone will be created for non-technological processes. But I still think it likely that job automation eventually won't leave enough room for this "jobs for everyone" scenario.
Jobs can resist automation in many several ways:
Clearly this leaves a lot of room for a future society where jobs cannot be automated away.