
Originally Posted by
publius3
"Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together. Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects. These projects didn't just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things." - Zuckerberg at Harvard
Its one way to think of it but not necessarily the best way. Clean electricity, moon shots or in our generation trips to Mars, cures for polio, or I suppose in our generation hopefully cancer and HIV among others, are definitely things we would want to do. But here's the thing, if we could do that with a cheap widget that took very little time to make and needed only one person to activate the widget that would be absolutely fantastic. Conversely, if it requires billions of people to work collectively then maybe that is just something we have to do. Nevertheless, we must never forget that jobs are a cost of our getting things done. The reason this is important is the age old issue of scarcity itself. Make no mistake about it, labor remains a 'scarce' resource. This is why productivity enhancing tools from the wheel to the shovel to the cotton harvester resulted in such enhanced living standards. They all free up labor for one purpose to be used in other purposes to achieve other things that we are desirous of achieving.