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I don't think this takes into account rising productivity of labor. Sure, people can't eat dollars but dollars still represent value.



Yes I think it is ironic if people are worried about both technological unemployment and a scarcity of labor.


It’s still possible for it to be a problem. Human skills aren’t entirely fungible. If technological disruption continues to increase in pace then we may reach a point where people’s education becomes obsolete before they even finish their degrees.

We could see large scale technological unemployment despite a shortage of labour in a set of ever-changing, highly specialized fields that people only end up in by an extremely lucky guess at the time they declare a major.


I am struggling to think of any part of my formal education, some of which occurred more than 20 years ago, which has been rendered obsolete by technical disruption. I don’t think technology is changing society that quickly.


It takes a whole different kind of reasoning to ponder the big picture. I'm not sure if anyone can do it. All I have is the clue that thinking from your own perspective never works. You get something like: I have money and kids, inheritance tax is bad. I lack money, the tax is good.

But to answer your question: Technical "disruption" is every instance of a thing making your job easier. It will require less skill/training and come with lower pay. Jobs with few, sometimes hard, decisions will benefit from technology. At some point the hard stuff is gone.

Perhaps your job was affected 0.1% in the last decade and the average is 5%. It would be just like 1 in 20 "jobs" vanished without anyone noticing it.


Dollars are how we account for net value provided, and their only value is in society’s collective agreement that tangible goods and services person A provided to B yesterday can be balanced by unlike goods and services A received from C today. They’re literally the debt that society owes the holder to compensate for past services to the society.

It’s not the only system of distributing goods and services to the populace. In theory, a centralized authority could evaluate everyone’s current need and provide it to them directly. This has gone disastrously wrong whenever it’s been tried in practice, though.




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