Indeed robots/tech are a classic double-edged sword. They improve living standards (markedly IMO) while increasing the threat that some work/types of job will be displaced. The answer is not Luddism or sacrificing living standards, it's more about education and skills and freeing markets not constraining them.
Legislate to enshrine lower levels of productivity in the face of global competition??.
Why would you do that?
Productivity is a measure of stuff made over time, not per person. You can work less and still increase productivity.
The only way we can compete globally is by being more productive and that means working smarter. We will never be better than a low cost economy at working longer (and why would we want to anyway?).
The answer is not Luddism or sacrificing living standards, it's more about education and skills and freeing markets not constraining them.
A free market for labour? Might sound compelling but that will just lead to people having to work longer and longer just to complete in the global market.
It is a constrained labour market that will enable the many to reap the rewards of afforded by the machines in the form of productivity gains. Some people are letting the side down (China I'm looking at you) but the answer isn't "if you can't beat them, joing them", it is to show them a better way.
There was an interesting talk about this on ted talks.
What will happen is that either:
A) Robotics will have to be curtailed within the work environment.
B) Everyone will be given a basic state wage linked to national growth, that is paid for by the few still in work that earn a fortune. Otherwise the whole capitalistic system will cave in on intself as the masses need to be able to spend money, to keep demand up and cash flowing.
The other option is massive financial insability with the rich hiding themselves behind walls and sophisticated security systems. They'll probably find a malthusian way to justify such an existence.
Why would you do that?
Sorry, could have misread what you were saying, I though that was what you were implying by legislation!!
The only way we can compete globally is by being more productive and that means working smarter. We will never be better than a low cost economy at working longer (and why would we want to anyway?).
True but our productivity record is not a good one! But that does not get away from the fact that if you seek higher wages without an increase in productivity, you end up with fewer people employed but earning more. It's a classic trade off.
Today's FT article below is not a bad take IMO (for those with access to the mouthpiece of unbridled capitalism!!)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc1001e0-f888-11e3-815f-00144feabdc0.html
Anyway, toddle-pip, have some profits to maximise now.
The raise of the robots is not only thrust forward by captialism but also limited by it.
If robots put too many people out of work, as is the worry of the OP...
Who exactly will be buying the goods/using the services provided by the them?
B) Everyone will be given a basic state wage linked to national growth, that is paid for by the few still in work that earn a fortune. Otherwise the whole capitalistic system will cave in on intself as the masses need to be able to spend money, to keep demand up and cash flowing.
Do you have a link? Sounds interesting.
I'd bet they covered it but what scenario b) is missing on the face of it is the option to take the tiny bit of work that is remaining and divide it up equally between everyone by limiting the amount of work one person is allowed to do. So everyone does a little bit of work and gets paid hansomely for it.
It's been a while since I've heard the "we can't pay better wages because it will cause inflation" argument
Wasn't even close to my point or even the discussion we are having. Just goes to show you are having your own Citizen Smith type argument in your head all the time 🙂
Mods, can we change Ernie's member tag to 'comrade' please?
Here we go
https://www.ted.com/talk/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs
I'd bet they covered it but what scenario b) is missing on the face of it is the option to take the tiny bit of work that is remaining and divide it up equally between everyone by limiting the amount of work one person is allowed to do. So everyone does a little bit of work and get's paid hansomely for it.
You can bet that the Daily Mail/Arbeit Macht Frei types will see to it that we end up with option c though.
This planet is going to look like a cross between Idiocracy and Elysium in 50 years, just with androids in door ways..."Welcome to costa, I love you".
[img]
Sorry, could have misread what you were saying, I though that was what you were implying by legislation!!
Legistlation could limit the amount of time one person could work for. E.g. a 30 hour week. However that doesn't limit the amount of work done in that time or the number of people that can be employed for 30 hours. So you wouldn't legislate to reduce productivity, but you could/should legislate to control how the productivity gains are shared out.
The aim is to increase GDP per hour worked, not GDP as an absolute measure.
What is important to us as individuals is quality of life, not absolute wealth.
The other option is massive financial instability with the rich hiding themselves behind walls and sophisticated security systems.
That sounds like the most likely option to me.
J, we have that already. Fortunately I chose to make myself exempt as do all my colleagues. Prefer that to be individual choice that legislated though.
BTW I was talking about free-er, not free markets in labour.
That sounds like the most likely option to me.
Yeah doesn't take genius to deduce that, does it. It's going to be one hilariously tragic joke.
Someone should start a nuclear holocaust soon, so that when some advanced civilisation finds our remains they can study us at the pinnacle of our achievments instead of what's coming.
Tom_W1987 - Your link was wonky. This should be the correct one.
https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs
I'm starting to wonder whether Battlestar Galctica is some sort of prophetic documentary.
Fortunately I chose to make myself exempt as do all my colleagues. Prefer that to be individual choice that legislated though.
But it's an illusion of choice. You have to work harder and harder to be competitive. But that competition is a race to the bottom.
No I choose to.
On that point, time to get back to it.
It's going to be one hilariously tragic joke.
I suppose it's [i]possible[/i] that the combination of massive wealth, endless leisure time and (before very long) almost indefinite lifespans among the richest people in the world might produce an amazing cultural and scientific age.
They may well build spacecraft and pyramids, create works of art that exist in media and forms that we cannot imagine, attain higher levels of consciousness than humans currently understand and learn to speak the language of owls.
If all that happened, it would be seen as a golden age of human history.
MSP - Member
I remember watching programs as a kid in the 70's (tomorrows world type stuff). That predicted how automation would reduce working hours free up leisure time and make everyone life so much better. Unfortunately it has been used to consolidate wealth into the hands of the few, increase working hours for many...
And if we hadn't allowed the Unions to be dismantled we could be pushing for shorter working hours in the week to keep employment levels up. Even the wealthy would benefit.
At the end of the day, robots don't buy consumer goods.
Lots of jobs are made up.
Just bring in a bit of regulation that says robots must have a weekly test of some sort and all of a sudden you have a one new human job for every robot and a little bit of wealth redistributed!
How many of us actually do necessary jobs now?
They may well build spacecraft and pyramids, create works of art that exist in media and forms that we cannot imagine, attain higher levels of consciousness than humans currently understand and learn to speak the language of owls.
As opposed to an age fraught with huge social division, climate change and Elysium style mass poverty?
Ohh but look but someone wired a microchip into their brain and gave themselves an IQ of 250, and like....Haliburton started drilling Mars....and some dude built a giant cock extension in the form of a 22nd century pyramid to the moon.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO humans, **** yeah!
IanW - Member
...How many of us actually do necessary jobs now?
Office workers. Surely you don't think gravity is the only thing keeping those chairs pinned to the floor... 🙂
The other option is massive financial instability with the rich hiding themselves behind walls and sophisticated security systems.
Sounds like South Africa.....
Why are we debating about where we are heading with automation? We are already there. Compare our working life to that of 200 years ago. Look around you, this is your answer.
We may be able to travel somewhat further, but I doubt we will much, as long as we have a significant capitalist element. People are always inventing new stuff for us to work on. The fewer people there are to work the mundane jobs, the more there will be available to invent cooler stuff (or support those inventing it).
For example, I work in IT. That's only possible because people invented computers, and people are always inventing new things to do with computers. Not everyone's cut out to be a software engineer, of course, but they are the PMs, the salespeople, the resource managers, the trainers, the office admins, the canteen staff, security guards and all sorts. Because I get sent around the country we run two cars, so we need twice as many tyres and services and extra fuel. And so on.
There hasn't been a long term crisis of employment since the industrial revolution. Every time a door has closed another has eventually opened.
When we find a way reduce the cost of food production, energy and manufacturing to near zero, and when population stabilises, then maybe we will approach the Star-trek model where you can not work and still live.
At the end of the day, robots don't buy consumer goods.
Absolutely and I think that's where capitalism is missing a trick. Put money in people's pockets and they will spend it. Pay peanuts or put them out of work and the market shrinks.
Absolutely and I think that's where capitalism is missing a trick. Put money in people's pockets and they will spend it. Pay peanuts or put them out of work and the market shrinks.
Missing what trick? People are earning more than ever. Stuff you want (but don't need) gets cheaper by the day.
The fewer people there are to work the mundane jobs, the more there will be available to invent cooler stuff (or support those inventing it).
The problem with that is that the IQ of your average person isn't condusive to inventing cool new stuff.
Most people will simply be driven in to mundane jobs where the cost of a robot is the same or more expensive than a human. It will be middle class professionals that cost a company a fortune to employ that will be hit. Statisticians? Who needs those if a computer understands data and it's application instead of simply knowing how to run a t-test. Doctors? Who needs those when a computer can colate significant amounts of data and make a more accurate diagnosis with lower error rates than a human counterpart.
All you need is a sub 100 IQ IT moron on the other end watching the machine and pressing the odd button now and you're sorted.
Missing what trick? People are earning more than ever. Stuff you want (but don't need) gets cheaper by the day.
That MIT economist I linked to seems to think that it's going to go the way slowoldman describes capitalism.
The problem with that is that the IQ of your average person isn't condusive to inventing cool new stuff.
Hence the 'support' clause. And people before talking about education.
It will be middle class professionals that cost a company a fortune to employ that will be hit.
Hmm, they are the ones who will be able to find (and have found) new roles. Computers already do the stats, now we just employ people to deploy those computers, and design the models. It then becomes cheaper to actually use statistical models, so more companies do it, so more work. I think MORE peopel are now employed in this kind of work, not fewer.
Computers already do the stats
They compute the stats, they don't understand them. When someone programs some software that understands statistics, statisticians are well and truly ****ed.
Hence the 'support' clause. And people before talking about education.
Education doesn't really improve baseline IQ, or creativity for that matter.
I think MORE peopel are now employed in this kind of work, not fewer.
Nope, if the systems are designed fluidly enough it wouldn't need any data entry clerks (this could be done directly by people on the ground....ie scientists in the field), it wouldn't need the statisticians.....all it would need is one fat bumbling IT nerd and hundreds of people would be out of buisness if a piece of software could understand statistics and it's application within a company.
When someone programs some software that understands statistics, statisticians are well and truly ****
No, they'll go away and develop new things to understand that the computers still can't.
Education doesn't really improve baseline IQ, or creativity for that matter.
It improves application of IQ, and I'd suggest it does increase creativity a lot. Because creativity in a given application is based on knowledge.
No, they'll go away and develop new things to understand that the computers still can't.
Like what, a new statistical approach? Sure, but all that takes is one programmer/statistician back home at the software developers HQ to patch it in.
and I'd suggest it does increase creativity a lot.
HAH!
No sorry, I don't think your average person has the capability to be some kind of self-employed artistic entrepreneur. What will happen is that educated people who are made redundant will simply be competing with the working classes for the same jobs, a few of the middle class types will have the where with all to develop their own buisnesses....no one else will though....society will end up just looking like South Africa.
Why are we debating about where we are heading with automation? We are already there.
Automation yes but when if/when we can create entities that can be creative that work without moaning and don't need much of a break then why employ people? People can maintain, create build the artificial people for a while but then you have machines that do that too.
At the bottom we have people who are unable to find work as the work these unskilled people used to do is done in automated factories or similar. I think the lowest skill level required to be employed will increase over time so that more and more are unemployable. At some point the costs of looking after these unemployable people becomes too great for the nation and national debt keeps increasing.
We just have to hope that there's a limit to the intelligence level of these artificial machines; can we ever really create an artificial conscious being?
At the bottom we have people who are unable to find work as the work these unskilled people used to do is done in automated factories or similar. I think the lowest skill level required to be employed will increase over time so that more and more are unemployable. At some point the costs of looking after these unemployable people becomes too great for the nation and national debt keeps increasing.
Yeah we havn't even solved the employment problems resulting from the mines shutting down, how are we going to solve future employment problems generated by automation if we can't even do that?
That's not how it's currently being played out. New advances in technology are making new things possible. Big data for example. As IT consultants, we're not engaged in making database applications any more, those are now easily implemented in a few days using off-the-peg software. We spend our time (at least in my job) talking to businesses about what they want to do using the off-the-peg software and helping them do it. And there's no shortage of new applications.
When we make stuff easy, we won't just limit ourselves to the same stuff done more easily. It'll allow us to build on that stuff and make even more hard stuff out of the easy stuff.
It used to be impossible to process huge volumes of data cheaply. Then the boffins at Intel and Seagate and whatnot made computing power cheap. Someone then invented a technique, and someone else created a super simple bit of software for processing lots of data. Now suddenly we can do things that were never possible before, and it's THOSE things that we are spending our time on.
As previously mentioned - given most of us are still in work despite 200 years of increased automation, surely we must be effective at finding new stuff to do?
When someone invented the steel framed building, did we just build all our buildings in half the time and give builders 3 day weeks? No, we just built bigger and more.
At the end of the day, robots don't buy consumer goods.
Only because consumer goods buying robots haven't been developed. Robot built consumer goods, bought by robots, and recycled by robots, would allow "the market" to operate without any human involvement.
And let's face it the needs of humans are constantly at odds with the needs of the market, and we all know how important the needs of the market are.
If it wasn't for interfering humans the market would work just fine.
.
People are earning more than ever.
That's not true. As percentage of GDP wages have fallen over the last 35 years. Cheaper manufactured goods is not an indication that wages have risen.
I develop Expert Systems and Molgrips is right, once you automate A, you don't just sit back and relax, you start thinking about B which you never had time to do when A was the issue and then when you sort B, you move onto C. So automation, in SW, just leads to an ever expanding remit - it never ends....
I also put people out of jobs as I basically write code that does Human jobs better than humans and thus make 'specialists' redundant as my code is better than they are....
... and I used to build financial models, along with a team of economists, academics, support staff etc - that needed to computers to run. Without computers to do the number crunching it would not have been possible to do what we did. Whether that is a good or bad thing is debateable, arguably we were just doing similar things but in a much more sophisticated way. But it kept me in bikes and leisure time!
I guess the utopian vision is that increase automation gives us decreased working hours - with the benefits of tech driven economic growth being spread around for all to enjoy. If the wealth isn't spread around [u]and[/u] unemployment increases continually - then who will buy the output of the automated production, I can't see how it would function either way to be honest.
I imagine we will muddle along with some middle ground like we do now - perhaps we can all become alternative therapists and life coaches?
There's some doom laden quotes in here, but a large percentage of jobs for the lower orders shall we say, have already been automated.
It's the middle orders(of which there are plenty on here 😉 ) which are the next target, and to quote from one of the terminator films 😆 "It wasn't the hardware, it was the software", With the simple and very well known line:
"There's an app for that".
There was some research done last year that if Apps and similar software continue their current rate of development, that as many as 6 million professional class jobs could disappear from this country. Bit doom laden and a little extreme, but everyone is a target for "progress"(cost cutting).
When we find a way reduce the cost of food production, energy and manufacturing to near zero, and when population stabilises, then maybe we will approach the Star-trek model where you can not work and still live.
That model was based on the fact that everybody contributed in some form for the betterment of mankind, be that science, engineering, art, etc, where we are going at the moment is to a society based on wealth only, how much you are worth, and how much you create, all other "non-profit" enterprises are superfluous.
Without competition, capitalism has just got fat and lazy, its no longer fit for purpose, and is now stagnating our development as a race, and in a lot of aspects since the last crash, we are going backwards.
That model was based on the fact that everybody contributed in some was for the betterment of mankind
Yes. Because you had limitless energy, manufacturing capability and food, all for free, then no-one could sell anyone anything. So people could do whatever they pleased.
But.. what about services? People would do stuff like.. play music and record it for the fun of it, and cleaning etc would be done by technology, but what would you want done that few people would want to do for you? You'd have to find a way to incentivise people to do unpleasant jobs and if those people didn't need money to buy consumer goods, how would you?
Is there any kind of service that would come under that category?
Unless the tech was (a) sentient and (b) applied that sentience in a way that suited humans - someone would still need to direct the tech. You could see that the main roles for humans would be in developing ideas/IP and in government/administration/policy design.
Missing what trick? People are earning more than ever
Well those with jobs are yes. Those who aren't scraping by on minimum wage or zero hours contracts, yes. I thought the thread was actually about employment. Those not employed cannot contribute to the market.
Sorry I appear to have come over all socialist there for a minute. I'll have some expensive red wine when I get home and forget all about it.
That's not how it's currently being played out. New advances in technology are making new things possible. Big data for example. As IT consultants, we're not engaged in making database applications any more, those are now easily implemented in a few days using off-the-peg software. We spend our time (at least in my job) talking to businesses about what they want to do using the off-the-peg software and helping them do it. And there's no shortage of new applications.
Why do you need to explain to people how to use database software and what they could apply it to, when easier to use software and a few GB's of video tutorials will do that for you?
Unless the tech was (a) sentient and (b) applied that sentience in a way that suited humans - someone would still need to direct the tech. You could see that the main roles for humans would be in developing ideas/IP and in government/administration/policy design.
That's the point I was making though, however the technology doesn't need sentience as in self-awareness. All it needs is an understanding of it's limited area, if it understands what statistical tool to use instead of needing a human to press the buttons or program R then you no longer need a statistician at the other end. Maybe a clever baboon.
I develop Expert Systems and Molgrips is right, once you automate A, you don't just sit back and relax, you start thinking about B which you never had time to do when A was the issue and then when you sort B, you move onto C. So automation, in SW, just leads to an ever expanding remit - it never ends....
Of course there's always more for you to do, you're a programmer. That doesn't mean that new technology is going to lead to new jobs for people who aren't programmers and in the long term you'll probably program yourselves out of a job as well - in fact some of you're compatriots are actively trying to do that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement
Only because consumer goods buying robots haven't been developed. Robot built consumer goods, bought by robots, and recycled by robots, would allow "the market" to operate without any human involvement.
Thats assuming you wan't them to be sentient. If you want slaves to put your rebellious overpaid serfs out of a job then they won't be.
I think the lowest skill level required to be employed will increase over time so that more and more are unemployable.
Yes of course lowest skill level rises... but it doesn't have to mean fewer are employed.
There was a time when many couldn't read or write... and there will be a time in the future when the vast majority know how to code.
Why do you need to explain to people how to use database software and what they could apply it to, when easier to use software and a few GB's of video tutorials will do that for you?
Seriously? Because if they hire me it's interactive. People can read the manual and google stuff now, and when they do they often fail. I've got experience, which I bring with me.
When someone invents a robot that can do all that I've done (possibly not far off - IBM Watson) then yeah I'll be screwed. But I'm not sure if it's even possible.
Of course there's always more for you to do, you're a programmer.
But footflaps' B, C and D aren't just programs to do a job - they are systems that need people to provide input and process output; but more importantly they are probably allowing the business to do new businessy things that it couldn't do before. And those new things will require people to do the business. There's no business I can think of that doesn't require any human input.
You could have had this exact same debate at any point over the last 200 years. And yet, we still work. We will still continue to work until we invent both the replicator and free energy. That'll change the game.
Give me an example then whereby a company get's more automation and then needs just as much staff as before, I can't see everyone being swallowed up by marketing/sales or as you put it....businessy things.
Interesting wiki article.
James S. Albus, a United States government engineer and pioneering inventor in automation, robotics and other intelligent systems, was concerned for many years about the potential social impact of advanced intelligent systems.[33][34][35] Dr. Albus was optimistic about the wealth producing capabilities of intelligent machines but concerned about the elimination of jobs and downward pressure advanced automation placed on human wages and incomes. In his 1976 book titled Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution[33] and on his websites,[34][36] Albus lays out a plan to broaden capital ownership to the point where every citizen becomes a capitalist with a substantial income from personal ownership of capital assets. This would achieve an economic system where income from ownership of capital assets would supplement—and eventually supplant—wages and salaries as the primary source of income for the average citizen. Albus believes this would lead to a world of prosperity and opportunity without poverty, war or pollution.Marshall Brain[2] and Martin Ford,[3] author of the 2009 book The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future are IT engineers who worry that advancing IT will displace workers faster than current economic structures can absorb them back into the economy. Ford presents an argument[3] for why the Luddite premise, although fallacious for two centuries, might nevertheless become valid as the speed of development of new machine technology differs substantially from the past. He compares this to the standard warning in financial prospectuses that "past performance is not a guarantee of future results". Brain and Ford both advocate pursuing some permutation of basic income or guaranteed minimum income, simply to keep the recirculation of value throughout the economy from stalling due to low employment. Although the earliest variants of these ideas involve direct support from the government, which could tax highly automated companies and use the revenue for both basic income and select reemployment, they have also evolved to include market-based mechanisms, comparable to minimum wage laws, requiring the private sector to employ humans but leaving the job descriptions to private innovation. In these lines of thinking, it is recognized that automation can continue to yield ever higher per capita standards of living (in contrast to classical Luddism), but the basic income or new markets decouple consumer purchasing power and confidence from the traditional labor market, which can suffer from fluctuations in the business cycle or (as Ford argues) even potential market failure. In its place would grow a new labor market insulated from these concerns.
In their books The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson write that the pace of automation has picked up in recent years due to a combination of increasingly clever advanced digital technologies. They write these technologies are making people more innovative, productive and financially richer, both in the short- and long-term, but at the cost of increasing wealth inequality in society. In the authors' view, one of the main in-egalitarian consequences of digital technological developments is its potentially negative impact on well-paid employment. The authors recommend governments consider modifying public education systems to place greater emphasis on teaching creativity and entrepreneurship, increasing investments in infrastructure and basic research, and revising tax policies to reward employers for hiring people and to increase the tax rates on wealthy individuals.[37][38] The authors advocate for a collaborative partnership between computers and humans as the road to future job creation. "In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery," they write, "the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines."[39][40][41][42][43]
Larry Summers wrote about the "devastating consequences" of robots, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and similar technologies for those who perform routine tasks. In his view, "already there are more American men on disability insurance than doing production work in manufacturing. And the trends are all in the wrong direction, particularly for the less skilled, as the capacity of capital embodying artificial intelligence to replace white-collar as well as blue-collar work will increase rapidly in the years ahead." Summers recommends more vigorous cooperative efforts to address the "myriad devices" (e.g. tax havens, bank secrecy, money laundering, and regulatory arbitrage) enabling the holders of great wealth to "avoid paying" income and estate taxes, and to make it more difficult to accumulate great fortunes without requiring "great social contributions" in return, including: more vigorous enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, reductions in "excessive" protection for intellectual property, greater encouragement of profit-sharing schemes that may benefit workers and give them a stake in wealth accumulation, strengthening of collective bargaining arrangements, improvements in corporate governance, strengthening of financial regulation to eliminate subsidies to financial activity, easing of land-use restrictions that may cause the real estate of the rich to keep rising in value, better training for young people and retraining for displaced workers, and increased public and private investment in infrastructure development, e.g. in energy production and transportation.[44]Michael Spence wrote that "Now comes a ... powerful, wave of digital technology that is replacing labor in increasingly complex tasks. This process of labor substitution and disintermediation has been underway for some time in service sectors – think of ATMs, online banking, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, mobile payment systems, and much more. This revolution is spreading to the production of goods, where robots and 3D printing are displacing labor." In his view, the vast majority of the cost of digital technologies comes at the start, in the design of hardware (e.g. sensors) and, more important, in creating the software that enables machines to carry out various tasks. "Once this is achieved, the marginal cost of the hardware is relatively low (and declines as scale rises), and the marginal cost of replicating the software is essentially zero. With a huge potential global market to amortize the upfront fixed costs of design and testing, the incentives to invest [in digital technologies] are compelling." Spence believes that, unlike prior digital technologies, which drove firms to deploy underutilized pools of valuable labor around the world, the motivating force in the current wave of digital technologies "is cost reduction via the replacement of labor." For example, as the cost of 3D printing technology declines, it is "easy to imagine" that production may become "extremely" local and customized. Moreover, production may occur in response to actual demand, not anticipated or forecast demand. "Meanwhile, the impact of robotics ... is not confined to production. Though self-driving cars and drones are the most attention-getting examples, the impact on logistics is no less transformative. Computers and robotic cranes that schedule and move containers around and load ships now control the Port of Singapore, one of the most efficient in the world." Spence believes that labor, no matter how inexpensive, will become a less important asset for growth and employment expansion, with labor-intensive, process-oriented manufacturing becoming less effective, and that re-localization will appear globally. In his view, production will not disappear, but it will be less labor intensive, and all countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital supporting their deployment and expansion. Spence writes that "the world we are entering is one in which the most powerful global flows will be ideas and digital capital, not goods, services, and traditional capital. Adapting to this will require shifts in mindsets, policies, investments (especially in human capital), and quite possibly models of employment and distribution."[45]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#1950s_to_present
I don't think we can predict the outcome.
Albus lays out a plan to broaden capital ownership to the point where every citizen becomes a capitalist with a substantial income from personal ownership of capital assets.
Do you think our overlords and Daily Heil types will actually ever let that happen?
Give me an example then whereby a company get's more automation and then needs just as much staff as before,
It doens't need to be one company. I could cite the whole country as an example though. We get more automation every year, and we don't have an employment crisis.