What do you think of the effect of population growth/shrinkage is on this problem? From what I can tell, the population is projected to go up to about 11 billion before it starts declining.
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
Also, at what point does this become a crisis? How many of the truck drivers will be retired by the time automated trucks become widespread enough to unemploy them? Most seem to be nearing retirement age currently.
https://www.teletracnavman.com/blog/truck-driver-age-demographics
1) Naively, population growth should delay automation by decreasing wages. Frey and Osborne don’t account for this, let alone more realistic second-order effects (e.g. ‘more people, more demand, thus feedback...’). But they don’t commit to a real timeframe anyway.
2) Banally: “if economic growth matches or exceeds population growth, at least the downside will be bounded”. But we’re not going to get sensible macro’ predictions for a century away, so that ends that thought.
Even conditional on Frey and Osborne’s dramatic scenario, I doubt there will be a crisis (in the sense of sudden violent unrest), since automation progress isn’t that fast (e.g. takes a given public company years, not days) and can often be stalled by regulation. Things like job sharing (n part-time workers instead of one full-time worker) could be stepped-up very gradually too. (Or whatever the minimal change to the system that just averts an explosion is.)
What do you think of the effect of population growth/shrinkage is on this problem? From what I can tell, the population is projected to go up to about 11 billion before it starts declining. https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
Also, at what point does this become a crisis? How many of the truck drivers will be retired by the time automated trucks become widespread enough to unemploy them? Most seem to be nearing retirement age currently. https://www.teletracnavman.com/blog/truck-driver-age-demographics
Demographics: not sure!
1) Naively, population growth should delay automation by decreasing wages. Frey and Osborne don’t account for this, let alone more realistic second-order effects (e.g. ‘more people, more demand, thus feedback...’). But they don’t commit to a real timeframe anyway.
2) Banally: “if economic growth matches or exceeds population growth, at least the downside will be bounded”. But we’re not going to get sensible macro’ predictions for a century away, so that ends that thought.
Even conditional on Frey and Osborne’s dramatic scenario, I doubt there will be a crisis (in the sense of sudden violent unrest), since automation progress isn’t that fast (e.g. takes a given public company years, not days) and can often be stalled by regulation. Things like job sharing (n part-time workers instead of one full-time worker) could be stepped-up very gradually too. (Or whatever the minimal change to the system that just averts an explosion is.)