Quote from logic_man:
While I don't doubt that a lot of what you said would help, the issue of automation creating "demand destruction" vis-a-vis human labor is actually a bigger issue than government, in some respects.
Even if investment and growth-oriented policies were embraced by governments in the West, the investments would be in capital, not labor. A significant number of human beings are simply priced out of the labor market at this point. And, increasing investment in labor automation, due to the nature of the virtuous cycle of productivity improvements in automation technologies as computing power grows, would only exacerbate the issue.
That's what they said when Ford invented the car, Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison electricity, and HP the personal computer. All of those revolutionary technologies made workers obsolete in one industry, but fueled growth in the emerging tech industry, along with unrelated sectors...
Again, not to be rude, your argument is based on a general ignorance of how wealth is created and how innovation in one industry, leads to cost savings, and industrial expansion in other sectors. Take for the example the invention of the Model-T. It was slated to destroy the horse and buggy industry, which involved breeders, keepers, blacksmiths, leather tanners etc. Countless jobs would be lost!! And they were. Except the manufacturing of vehicles absorbed much of those displaced workers, and the cost savings derived from use of motor vehicles and the revolutionary impacts it had on transport, drove down the costs of physical consumables in all sectors, and allowed for greater economies of scale in the production of other goods. This meant consumers could buy more per dollar in their pocket, which they did, on other industries, like clothing, travel, food, housing. And then those industries experienced a subsequent boom which net-net, employed far more people than the horse and buggy industry ever did! That's how it works, in a nutshell.
Now take your example about automation. Robotics will displace a big chunk of workers, increasingly so, in industry. True. On the flipside, an entirely new field in design, engineering, IT and fabrication will emerge. And full-scale industrial automation (along with competition) will drive down production costs to an extremely cheap level. The price level, like it did upon the emergence of electricity, the car, the steam engine, computer, will decline, markedly. The net result is consumer wages buy far more stuff than they did before, which is spent on more manufactured products, food, clothing, shelter, travel, education, healthcare etc, which drives expansion in those sectors, and net-net employment goes up. And producers/manufactures sell more stuff at a similar margin (due to the reduction in manufacturing costs) = higher profits!!! This is how wealth is created...
The next thing you'll say is - what about a Terminator scenario where AI robots can do virtually all tasks for human beings, and there's no jobs left for us? That's the point. Humans don't work for works sake. We don't work so we can have a job to do. We work so we can buy things in exchange for our labor. In the T2 scenario, the machines could produce everything humans need, so there wouldn't be any need for us to work, to begin with! That means paradise. Nobody has to work > nobody has to be compensated for work > most everything is free, or cost pennies.... The real problem with that scenario is not so much that humans dont have jobs. It's political. Government and Corporations won't want to share the wealth. If humans have everything we need, there's no real method to control the people, and most people, would get real interested in politics, since they've got nothing else to do, which represents competition for the power elite at the top, who enjoy ruling over us.
