It's not clear that we ever did pull out of it. A certain small class of people who couldn't move away from agriculture, say Native Americans who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyles, suffered tremendously as the country industrialized and the valuable land was taken over for industrial agriculture. They have never recovered, and are the poorest people in the U.S. to this day.
What this means is that people need to move to whatever is next, and those who don't, or more importantly can't, will be left behind. But what's next? During the industrial revolution, people moved to cities to go work in factories. But what's the way forward today? Arguably the key difference between today and back then is that the industrial revolution caused a change in where labor was demanded, while the automation revolution reduces the need for labor across almost all sectors of the economy. Yes, some people need to program the machines, but not that many. After all, during the industrial revolution it wasn't mechanical engineering that offered job opportunities for the masses.
To me, the obvious "what's next" is this: those whose jobs are obsoleted by automation personally service those whose jobs aren't. It's possible that the future of America is 2/3 of the population acting as nannies, personal assistants, etc, to the 1/3 whose jobs haven't been automated. I bet there are a ton of people even now who would cook/clean/etc for $5/hour + board. You'd already see this in the U.S. if it wasn't for the minimum wage/welfare. What happens when automation drives the price of unskilled labor down to $2-3/hour? The U.S. becomes Bangladesh is what happens. I think it's a social disaster in the making, but I struggle to think of alternatives.
Essentially, this is the road back to serfdom. The key difference being that Medieval serfs worked land on behalf of landowners, whereas in this scenario, they simply provide services.
I agree that it's a social disaster in the making, but I suspect it's a real possibility.
Being a cook isn't (necessarily) unskilled labor. Neither is being a hairdresser, a personal shopper, a sommelier, or a yoga instructor.
You can make a very respectable income today in the U.S. at any of those jobs if you're sufficiently skilled. Certainly there are many more people doing those jobs today than there were a hundred years ago. And frankly, many of them would probably much rather be doing such a "personal service" job over their career options of decades ago.
And that's not counting plumbers, electricians, carpenters... Many of whom find it much easier to develop recurring revenue streams than your typical YC startup!
Automation is great. It helps most of those people. Just think about how much your local yoga studio or coffee shop relies on modern PoS systems for payment processing and customer tracking, the web and social media for marketing, Amazon-class logistics for supplies...
I just don't see things in such negative terms. I also don't think that today's rates of unemployment were somehow inevitable. We automated like mad in the '90's too (arguably even more dramatically than we are doing so today), and yet unemployment dropped, incomes rose and labor markets were tight from top to bottom. What's different today?
> We automated like mad in the '90's too (arguably even more dramatically than we are doing so today), and yet unemployment dropped, incomes rose and labor markets were tight from top to bottom. What's different today?
There are no vast failed commie economies left to piggyback on their recovery and imminent growth. Right before the Warsaw Pact collapse and China's conversion to capitalism, America and its allies were not doing particularly well, in economic terms.
I believe the key to this issue is to have more middle-class to increase the needs for a certain quality service. We all know good service is more than just fulfilled the basic needs. To make it more clear, there has to be more people with middle class consuming capability. We are hitting a bottleneck. If it cannot be raised in a certain period, bad things could happen. Human society has its own way to force the rebalance. However, it's quite ugly. And I wish we can avoid this.
What this means is that people need to move to whatever is next, and those who don't, or more importantly can't, will be left behind. But what's next? During the industrial revolution, people moved to cities to go work in factories. But what's the way forward today? Arguably the key difference between today and back then is that the industrial revolution caused a change in where labor was demanded, while the automation revolution reduces the need for labor across almost all sectors of the economy. Yes, some people need to program the machines, but not that many. After all, during the industrial revolution it wasn't mechanical engineering that offered job opportunities for the masses.
To me, the obvious "what's next" is this: those whose jobs are obsoleted by automation personally service those whose jobs aren't. It's possible that the future of America is 2/3 of the population acting as nannies, personal assistants, etc, to the 1/3 whose jobs haven't been automated. I bet there are a ton of people even now who would cook/clean/etc for $5/hour + board. You'd already see this in the U.S. if it wasn't for the minimum wage/welfare. What happens when automation drives the price of unskilled labor down to $2-3/hour? The U.S. becomes Bangladesh is what happens. I think it's a social disaster in the making, but I struggle to think of alternatives.