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Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence (qz.com)
Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people.
You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken some of them a few months but eventually they found something else. My company just bought a machine that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.
And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.
Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it. Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future.
Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.
I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.
My original comment was not about home schooling. It was about parents spending all time w/ their kids once kids are out of school - no daycares. That would include being involved w/ helping their kids w/ both homework and extra curricular activities.