If you look at the history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs, not a lack of jobs.
If you look at history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs - to lower paying jobs. The destruction of America's middle class should be a testament to that. People think that their middle-class salary factory jobs all moved to China, but in reality most were simply automated.
Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.
Unemployment has fluctuated dramatically over the last century as a percentage between nearly zero percent in WW2 to over 20% during the Great Depression.
If you look at history, I believe you'll see that automation of any sort has resulted in the movement of jobs - to lower paying jobs. The destruction of America's middle class should be a testament to that. People think that their middle-class salary factory jobs all moved to China, but in reality most were simply automated.
Unemployment may be high now (tough to get a good number showing the difference over the last century, but at least one of the brilliant people on HN knows how to do it), but I suspect that if you exclude the last 5 years, unemployment was fairly flat as a percentage over the last century.
Unemployment has fluctuated dramatically over the last century as a percentage between nearly zero percent in WW2 to over 20% during the Great Depression.