I agree. If jobs of the pass are supplanted by automation that'll just give the markets the energy to reflect on new opportunities with demand and then jobs.
The jobs the OP is referring are not coming back and that is good, but new jobs will be replacing them. I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated.
If meaniful work does go away what does that mean? Everybody has everything they can imagine?
I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated.
Because economic productivity is no longer translating cleanly into increased buying power and demand (expressed, usually, as a rise in real hourly wages). Without that link, productivity growth through, say, automation just becomes increased capital accumulation, because the people doing the automation, by self-selection of their choice to invest in automation rather than eating their profits, already have a lower marginal propensity to consume than normal.
The result is that new stuff gets invented, but little to no-one can buy it, because "you're not entitled" to wages sufficiently high to make discretionary purchases (like a private car) or personal infrastructure upgrades (like passivehaus insulation to save on heating costs).
What you're saying doesn't make sense. If nobody can afford to buy anything (no demand) then nothing will get made. If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting.
Imagine that you have two companies producing pens, and society currently uses X pens/year. If company A can find a way to automate production, they can sell pens cheaper than B (and/or at a higher profit margin). Because A laid off people, society no longer consumes X pens, but the difference is distributed between both A and B (and other pen companies, and non-pen companies would also see a loss). Assume every company acts in their own best interest.
If company A instead uses their extra money and gives it away to their now unemployed former employees, then society would be back to using X pens/year, and demand is maintained. But that is clearly not in A's best interest, so they do not. Now we have the ability to produce more stuff as a society (not just pens, because the unemployed can be used anywhere). However, all this gets us is people who can no longer afford what they once could.
The world isn't full of Dell Computers. This year's tomatoes are grown based on last year's demand or this year's demand for out-of-season import tomatoes. There's a time delay and someone gets stuck with the risk, belly-up if demand collapses.
If automation beyond a point actually decreases demand for the outputs, then its self-limiting.
Yes, but it will grow and then self-limit into an equilibrium state where humanity has a much lower real standard of living because it can't "earn" the output it's easily capable of producing.
Automation makes human labor more efficient. Efficiency of a resource doesn't reduce its consumption; it increases it. That's the Jevons paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And yes, it does apply to labor. That's why the cotton gin made slavery worse, not better.
The whole issue is the difference between the human definition of "meaningful" and the economic definition. The former can easily create work in a downright post-scarcity situation: a new Act of Creation, a new playground or painting or programming language, will always be meaningful as long as one person other than its creator invests meaning in it. It's the economic definition that decrees "Work is meaningful if it generates Economic Value equivalent to the costs of housing, food, health insurance, and profit margins for the providers of each."
Once you've got rid of "cleaning" as an entire class of job, using new non-stick surfaces, roombas with steam cleaning attachments and so on, you don't just invent a new thing that needs manual cleaning, a good-enough universal cleaner will clean anything a person can.
Same with self-driving vehicles - once you solve that class of problems, nothing needs hand delivering again.
Same with automating any kind of fast food, manufacturing, warehouse loading and moving.
What are you going to invent in this future which needs to employ millions of people but doesn't involve then making or moving anything, typing or calculating, translating or pattern recognising?
