> I hope it’s better wherever you are, but here you don’t want your job automated unless you stay on the payroll, which by definition can’t be everyone.
If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.
The past is a guide to the future, but no guarantee of it.
Real wages, age of home ownership, age when folks decide to start a family, choose a metric that will stand up to any scrutiny and the advance of broad-based welfare has been in retreat for well over a decade.
Slightly more anecdotally but still very well documented is the proliferation of homeless folks, often families now, often recently employed now, living in ever-growing tent encampments in major urban areas.
When operations research PhDs have all real constraints removed social, regulatory, and legal and arbitrarily increasing compute and governmental influence (we just the other day tore down the Chevron Deference doctrine) things get real neo-feudal, real fast.
In an era of ever increasing and compounding change, appeals to past compromises between the donor class and the working person are just talking points. All I hear is “got mine”.
If the "fixed amount of work reduced by automation" assumption that is necessary to support "by definition can't be everyone" was true, >99% of humanity would per permanently unemployment by the past progress of technology.