There should be less jobs in the switch; that's how automation is supposed to work, after all, increasing efficiency and whatnot.
The bigger question is whether the total number of jobs in the economy will stay high enough to not have permanent mass unemployment. My guess is, "yes it will, for now at least".
Most of these jobs are long term indeed going to be automated away. Order picking in a warehouse is still difficult enough that it involves some people but it's not hard to see how that could be reduced over time. Driving delivery vans is also an obvious candidate for getting automated away. However, short term this is just Amazon responding to increased demand because of Corona.
Mass unemployment would get accompanied by mass loss of disposable income, so that would actually be bad for Amazon. Automating the supply kind of automates away some of the demand.
The notion of bullshit jobs is basically about people doing busy work without actually doing or producing anything of real value. The industrial revolution produced a lot of that already. There's going to be more of it. Easy to predict, because there already is a lot of it.
IMHO the lockdown kind of revealed just how pointless some of our jobs really are. Masses of people suddenly worked from home and it did not really disrupt a lot of the supply chains or economy. Instead of being useless in some cubicle, people now got to be useless at home. Technically that should have been a huge productivity hit; except a lot of these people were never really that productive to begin with. The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.
> The notion of bullshit jobs is basically about people doing busy work without actually doing or producing anything of real value.
I think this is real to a certain extent; think of it as bureaucratic 'cruft'. However, it's also hard to spot exactly which jobs are bullshit; if it was easy, you won't have this problem of dead weight positions in big companies. There are almost certainly jobs that look bullshit but aren't, and vice versa.
> and it did not really disrupt a lot of the supply chains or economy...
Your argument made sense up to this point, I agree we should have implemented WFH and Online classes years ago in order to lower traffic congestion and reduce our carbon footprint as inter-connectivity increased.
What I think you're missing is the critical flaw when we saw a massive hit in the Supply Chain, the Value systems within them responded in kind. I'd argue the Supply Chains remarkably broke down (specifically in food, gym equipment and toiletry). Distribution becomes an impossibility when demand far outweighs production and you have nothing to ship for weeks to months, or you have no one to harvest and it rots in fields.
> The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.
Consumer based economies have this baked into the system, and is actually one of my gripes with this Crony-Capitalist system we've been operating under, but it has it's limitations: this year's black Friday which was a monumental failure by most economists metrics, but was actually a reversion to the mean wherein people have lost significant amounts of expendable income they spend this time of year (which is really debt driven) and overproduction was met with large price reductions that will likely remain. Target, one of the largest online retailers, had a month long 'black Friday' sale as did New Egg and these are the affects of supply forecasting done several quarters ago, perhaps some even from 2019. Unfortunately politicians make giving them bailouts a priority and the model never really seems to undergo the correction that needs to happen to reduce overall consumption to sustainable levels.
For someone who did Supply Chain and Logistics in the Auto Industry and is now returning back into it after a 4 year hiatus, its a Brave New World with immense challenges. Some things still remain, but it's definitely not the same animal at all.
> Mass unemployment would get accompanied by mass loss of disposable income, so that would actually be bad for Amazon
This is nonsense. You’re saying Amazon should keep paying wages so people can use those wages to shop at Amazon. When put that way you can see it makes no sense.
The only thing that matters is that as we increase productivity the benefits are relatively evenly shared. If a 4 or 3 day week becomes normal for everyone and we still output the same or even more, that’s great.
UBI comes from taxes collected from across the state/country. It’s not a private industry thing.
There’s no way any company would pay wages to employees under the premise that it will keep their company afloat because they’ll spend the money they just gave them on their goods. Why not just not give them the money in the first place.
I understand the attitude that this isn't a new phenomenon, but degrees can't be ignored. The labor force participation rate has been consistently falling for a long time (at least 20 years) in the USA (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...). I'd argue that the data there still doesn't cover the full force of what's been going on: career positions have typically been replaced with a gig economy.
It's not hard to see that the scope of automation could increase in areas that would more drastically affect employment in the short to mid term than the other developments we've seen in the last 20 years. Either full long-haul automation or almost full automation with remote intervention could be a reality in the very near future, but almost certainly will be in 10 years. Call centers will be almost completely automated. Factories are automated to a much higher degree than they have been in the past. Every industry is solving problems with software that increase efficiency of workers (ie, fewer workers needed) and that trend is accelerating.
We can always say "this time isn't different". History tends to repeat itself. My point is: the trend is already there to see and the evidence suggests that it may accelerate very soon.
Sure you do. New technologies are new and do new things.
So far, there hasn't been problems with mass unemployment. But looking into the far future, when robots are advanced enough to do the basic labor of growing food, building homes, doctoring, shipping stuff around, etc. It's not super clear how much you'd really need human labor at that point, which could easily mean mass unemployment.
Of course, with the right societal design, mass unemployment could be a perfectly fine thing.
The bigger question is whether the total number of jobs in the economy will stay high enough to not have permanent mass unemployment. My guess is, "yes it will, for now at least".