60% Unemployment.

[swestrup]

An interesting .PDF came out recently that projects that 60% of current jobs will be done by computer by 2030. Now, that doesn't really mean 60% unemployment as these newly automated jobs will enable new jobs that don't exist now. This is a common pattern. On the other hand, at some point, and probably by 2030, we'll have reached the point of automating jobs faster than new ones are created. Sometime after that we should hit 100% unemployment.

I can hardly wait.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

This makes no sense to me. "Employment" means you ask someone to do something, and you give them money. To get 100% unemployment, you have to eliminate people, asking or money. Of these, money is the most likely to go, but without it I'm not sure how you define the "jobs" that the machines are doing?

[ai731.livejournal.com]

The rate at which we're using up all the oil, which is used (among other things) to fly and truck food from one end of the country to the other (not to mention to power large, heavy farming machinery, and produce commercial fertilizers), I would think that an important source of employment in 2030 is going to be manual labour on small, local, organic farms. That is, if we want to continue eating...

[swestrup]

I'm honestly not too worried about that scenario. I think folks have been relying on coal and oil for our energy needs for far too long. Its long since past time that we started looking for alternatives that didn't cause the amount of death and pollution that those do.