What happens when there aren't jobs left for people to do?

My technical gurus tell me that the U.S. is passing through a transitional phase in job markets as it does every two or three generations. Every time a major industry in the United States has gone into decline, a new industry has sprung up to replace it. At this time, due to high labor costs in the U.S., we are seeing outsourcing of most of our tech manufacturing jobs. But historically another industry will spring up to replace it. It will be fun to see what that new industry will be.

Spot on! But we already know what will replace it. Advanced economies are shifting from manufacturing to services.

I believe the next field will be biological engineering.

What I am talking about is different though. I'm not saying that this will happen soon, just that WE WILL REACH A LIMIT ON NEW FIELDS AT SOME POINT And computers will eventually surpass us in doing intellectual jobs too. Please read the article.

American Perspective

Good Work
Job strategies for the new economy.
By Robert Kuttner

That's like saying that all the songs that there can be will eventually all be written or that all the paintings that can be envisioned will eventually all have been painted. It hasn't been so long ago that a smart man predicted that the U.S. Patent Office would soon close because just about everything that could be invented had already been invented. Since he wrote that (around the turn of the century) people thought up 90% of the world's inventions that we now have.

I do not believe we have more than a tiny fraction of science that is available to be had nor do I think that humankind has achieved more than a fraction of its potential.

The only limitations are those we impose upon ourselves.

Foxfyre, you miss my point.

There are only a few things left that people can still do better or cheaper than a computer.

A few decades from now, there won't be any.

What then? Do you think corporations will continue to hire architects when computers can design building better, safer, faster, and a lot cheaper than people? The same goes to any intellectual field.

I just think you need a huge shot of optimism Centroles. Every generation has a little period of fear and hopelessness when it seems we have so little control over our destinies.'

But when you see how far we've come and can just partially imagine how far we can still go, there are no worries that computers are going to take over the world.

Even in my own lifetime, 99% of the work tasks I used to do by hand I am now doing with computer. Yet I am working longer hours than I ever have before. I'm not too worried about being replace by a compuer.

There are lots of things people can still do better and cheaper than a computer. People are high tech machines, incredibly complex, infinitely adaptable, and they reproduce themselves.

There is no machine in history that has ever replaced human labor. Machines extend human labor and amplify it. The more productive and cheap that machines become, the greater the demand for humans who can operate them.

We had outsourcing of a lot of our maintenance work a few years ago. What happened was that a group of tradesmen who had cost the company around $100 million to train, were paid out around $40 million in redundancy payments, so that 24 hours later they could come back onto the plant doing exactly the same jobs they were doing before, only now they work for contractors who charge $60 an hour for their labour, instead of the $25 an hour average that it was costing before. This is what they call management!

We just start hiring and paying each other for ever more of those talking jobs we keep each other occupied with.

My grandparents generation, a third of the population worked in agriculture, a third worked in industry, all of 'em making stuff, growing stuff, by hand ...

Thanks to mechanisation and automisation and all that, a single machine can now produce a lot more than all those men back then, more cheaply. So producers make a lot more money ...

... which they spend on hiring extra accountants, management consultants, motivational trainers, account managers, public relations officers, advertisement designers, webmasters, human resources personnel, temping agency middlemen ... and then all of those richly paid people go out and pass their money on to hairdressers, perfume sellers, film producers, yoga instructors, survival tour guides, musical stars, restaurant owners, language instructors, porn website entrepeneurs, gym owners, DJs, car dealers, cellphone salesmen, graphic designers, computer game designers, style advisors, real estate agents, insurance agents, columnists, personal banking advisors, media trainers, multimedia artists, videoclip producers, handbag designers, skiing instructors, managers of fake-snow all-season skiiing resorts, cleaners at the fake-snow all-season skiiing resorts, tickets salesmen at the fake-snow all-season skiing resorts, travel agency workers who book tickets to the fake-snow all-season skiing resorts, massageurs, game show hosts, soap series producers, creative directors, storyboard writers, stage managers, visageurs, models, stand-up comedians, interior designers, landscapers, gardeners, cookbook writers, paintball hall owners, conference centre managers, ehmm ... can someone take over from me, here? I gotta go!

And so it is that technology frees us from labor. Too bad we're ill-adapted to leisure.