The issue isn’t that there are zero jobs. The issue is that there are far, far fewer jobs after automation and there are not other options.
We have massively reduced farm labor through automation, but people moved to industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing automation moved labor to office work and service jobs. In both there are still some people who design, build, and maintain the machinery, but they are a small fraction of what came before. We don’t have additional jobs waiting to be filled, and with big increases in automation it will be easier to automate any new potential source of labor.
This could be avoided by universal income and health care and other approaches where the general public benefits from all this automation, but the environment that pushes the automation gives them the power to keep that from happening.
The issue isn’t that there are zero jobs. The issue is that there are far, far fewer jobs after automation and there are not other options.
We have massively reduced farm labor through automation, but people moved to industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing automation moved labor to office work and service jobs. In both there are still some people who design, build, and maintain the machinery, but they are a small fraction of what came before. We don’t have additional jobs waiting to be filled, and with big increases in automation it will be easier to automate any new potential source of labor.
This could be avoided by universal income and health care and other approaches where the general public benefits from all this automation, but the environment that pushes the automation gives them the power to keep that from happening.