What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough?
When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.
Horses used to be used for practically everything. The first commercial steam engine pumped water from mines and was measured in "horsepower", the the rate at which a horse could continuously pump water. Then steam engines replaced freight hauling. Then personal transport. Don't see many working horses now.
Don't see many horses at all. That is, the offspring of those working horses certainly doesn't roam about in pastures, to pursue happiness because there are no jobs that require them.
> The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.
Some believe that a human life has intrinsic value, even outside the value of the species as a whole and even outside the value of that human's labour.
What about if there are a group of people who cannot do mid-to-high skilled jobs (whilst potentially controversial, I think this is accurate)?
If we replace all of those jobs what do they do?
I have always thought there is a far-future dystopian story in that somewhere; society has evolved IT and automation to the extent that only the top 25% of individuals actually "work" and everyone else has leisure. The 25% decide they want a leisurely life also, causing the collapse of society...
Even if there is such a group of people, unable to learn a new trade, surely they're not the majority.
So there is lots of room for improving the situation.
There are lots of stories of American coal miners going into tech when the mining jobs dried up.
But their process of getting there is through charitable organizations, not a proper educational program.
There are vested interests in promoting those sorts of stories, as a counterpoint to the depressing reality that far more drop out of the economy onto the disability rolls and slowly or quickly drink and drug themselves to death.
Who do the 25% sell all their custom salads to? Automation is great at producing consumer goods not so much at producing luxury goods. One would think that the problem of not enough consumers to buy the stuff automation produces would be a self limiting mechanism. A UBI doesnt really address the problem either because it is essentially just taking money from those that own the automation equipment and giving it to those that don't so they can turn around and buy stuff from the automation equipment :/
But human life is dynamic. The most productive and innovative contributors start out as drooling infants and up as feeble elders. Society has to support more than high earners and their favorites.
When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.