In the good old days, dump trucks came in one discrete unit. Nowadays, they pull trailers with as much cubic space as themselves. Once upon a time, buses, too, were constituted in a fairly modest vehicle. Today, they are double their previous size. Half as many drivers are now required to pilot these roadway behemoths. This “causes unemployment,” in the view of many folks.
Even worse are automatic trains, such as those which run 24-7 in the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. They use no conductors at all. In sharp contrast, at least the BMT, the IRT and the IND transit systems in New York City have the decency of employing conductors on the subway trains of the Big Apple, thus (allegedly) reducing the jobless rate.
Even worse than that, there is now the prospect of completely driverless cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles. Given that they will be safer than human drivers, well and good. No decent person wants the continuation of some 40,000 annual traffic fatalities and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries. But this will be horrific for our unemployment rate, in the view of all too many people.
And while we are at it, those of us worried about the elimination of jobs can look upon AI improvements with dismay. Grok, Claude, Perplexity and their brethren already pass the Turing Test. You can’t tell whether you are communicating with a person or a computer anymore.
Such is the source of a widespread economic anxiety. Those struck by it suffer from the “lump of labor” fallacy. In this view, there is only so much work to be done, and if machines take away a lump of labor, there will be just that much left for human beings to do. This is mistaken.
At one time in our history, some 98% of the population lived and worked on the nation’s farms. They were all needed, desperately needed, just to feed the people of the country. Nowadays, almost the reverse statistic is true. Roughly 2% of the U.S. labor force is employed today in the agricultural sector. Did this change precipitate a stupendously massive rate of unemployment? Not at all. Rather, ex-farmers were released from their previous tasks and freed up to become professors, dentists, plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, musicians, artists, actors, garbage collectors, chefs, carpenters, professional athletes, and all the rest that now constitute the bulk of the American workforce.
Ditto for the once widespread horse and buggy industry. When the horseless carriage came, running on steam, that utterly devastated jobs as horse trainers, saddle and whip makers, blacksmiths, and people needed to sweep the streets. They were no longer required for those tasks in such great numbers and were then able to supply us with a plethora of other goods and services. Those previously employed by providing horse and buggy transportation were not limited in their new work to work on automobiles by any means.
Where will the new jobs come from when automation more fully comes on stream? It is very difficult to predict. No one could accurately foretell job replacement when people left the farms and the horse and buggy industry in droves. We cannot now do so either.
We can only imagine: maybe large numbers of people will be needed to colonize the Moon or Mars. Perhaps it is on to other solar systems for the likes of us, after we get through with the other eight planets and their own heavenly bodies. Maybe we shall plumb the depths of our own planet, and poke into what lies at the bottom of the ocean, and even below that real estate. Then, there is always that old standby, inventions and completely new presently unimaginable products.
Here is another source of new jobs, more mundane than those science fiction options. They will probably not involve a mere quantity of food. Maybe new employment will involve improving the quality of food, and other products essential to everyday life. A lot of work still needs to be done to curing, and preventing, cancer, heart attacks and other dread diseases. Remember that we are only guessing now.
But suppose masses of people become aesthetes. That is, they really do not want much more than they will already have in the future. In that case, there is leisure. The workweek might come down to ten hours, five, or one, because we will be so rich that our needs can be provided with only a minimum of human labor. That would not be so bad.
If all this comes about, it will not be due to limiting working hours or ensuring that as many already-imagined jobs are preserved and filled.
Machines, computers, and AI, are our friends. And so is the capitalist system which brings about economic progress which has already lengthened our lives and made them far more enjoyable.
By
