Tim Worstall suggests that there is an interesting piece in the WSJ going over the salient points of the robots are going to steal all our jobs story. You know, once robots can do everything better than humans can then we will all be left starving in a howling wasteland as none of us will have any jobs any more. Because people are using the wrong mental model of what technology does to jobs. The assumption is that in the past, sure, new technology has destroyed jobs, but it has also created new jobs at the same time. All we have to hope is that the robots create more jobs than they destroy and we will be fine. But that is, as Worstall says, the wrong mental model to be using here. Technological advance has always destroyed jobs, on balance. As will future technological advance, .... and we will be immensely the richer for it.
This is the correct way to frame it. Automation does not create jobs, not in aggregate. Instead it frees labor to satisfy some other desire. And as long as desires are unlimited then labor will always have something to do. We therefore simply does not need to worry about the robots coming to steal all our jobs.
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