Not sure if sarcastic but looking at the "net number of jobs" is a shallow analysis. Major trends are the appreciation of certain jobs for example in the IT industry (a nonexistant/tiny field until recently) and the devaluation of many others.
The next stage in automation is expected to make the work that most people are able to do completely obsolete, that's why many visionaries discuss basic income.
Another trend is the concentration of wealth, which may shape the economy, e.g. by providing lots of lowly paid "servant" jobs.
Even today the "free market" is augmented by huge welfare systems pretty much everywhere, including the US; suggesting that the free market alone can "find new uses for labor" and automatically create a functioning system is imo wrong and harmful.
> Major trends are the appreciation of certain jobs for example in the IT industry (a nonexistant/tiny field until recently) and the devaluation of many others.
This is the natural progression of jobs. Auto mechanics were a nonexistent / tiny field that soon grew, devaluing the once noble buggy whip and horse-related professions.
> The next stage in automation is expected to make the work that most people are able to do completely obsolete
This is where I and many others fundamentally disagree. Work may be made obsolete, but new jobs will be created, just as they always have.
> suggesting that the free market alone can "find new uses for labor" and automatically create a functioning system is imo wrong and harmful
I am not only "suggesting" - this is actually the what our economy does every single day! The free market allocates labor, the government is not involved except around the margins.
My great great grandfather was a Cooper. He had friends in the carriage industry. When cars were starting to get big it was obvious what to do: take their years of experience making buggy cars, and now make automobile cars. I’m not so certain that the current pattern of automation is the same as the last. In the past, the automation shifted labor jobs around. The new automation is of labor itself. Asking people to exit the labor market & move to a new market is harder than I think your optimism merits.
> The next stage in automation is expected to make the work that most people are able to do completely obsolete, that's why many visionaries discuss basic income.
It is true: The Jacquard Loom has already replaced good loom working jobs. <s>
More seriously, I am with you on more wealth equality.
Just taking a stab here but I think the idea behind automation is that the automation itself is more cost effective than the human resources, and in turn, yields the same or better results. Thus the human resource pool becomes inefficient when weighing the costs of paying all the humans versus weighing a machine.
There's only sense in exploiting a resource if the return is greater than the investment, and since automation replaces a workforce that doesn't require deep specialization, you end up with a resource pool that has little value. The big win for John Henry wasn't that he could keep up with the machine, but he actually exceeded it and was less costly, and demonstrated that a theoretical army of John Henry's were more efficient than an army of the railroad spike driving machines.
However, there's a lot of automation that while possible is still more expensive than having people do the work.
Flexible automation is far more expensive that fixed-task automation and for companies that do a mix of many different products/services, it's not unusual that people end up being more cost effective than robots.
The next stage in automation is expected to make the work that most people are able to do completely obsolete, that's why many visionaries discuss basic income.
Another trend is the concentration of wealth, which may shape the economy, e.g. by providing lots of lowly paid "servant" jobs.
Even today the "free market" is augmented by huge welfare systems pretty much everywhere, including the US; suggesting that the free market alone can "find new uses for labor" and automatically create a functioning system is imo wrong and harmful.