Self-Driving Cars Will Boost the Job Market, Says Marc Andreessen (recode.net)

A future with self-driving cars has induced a lot of anxiety about a resulting loss of jobs, but in fact, they'll create tons more jobs, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen (Wikipedia) said at Recode's annual conference on Tuesday evening. "The jobs crisis we have in the U.S. is that we don't have enough workers," he said. From a report: "It's a fallacy," Andreessen said (specifically citing the lump of labor fallacy and the luddite fallacy). "It's a recurring panic. This happens every 25 or 50 years, people get all amped up about 'machines are going to take all the jobs' and it never happens." Andreessen used the example of the rise of the automobile industry a century ago, which many thought would cost the livelihood of everyone whose jobs were to take care of horses. But "the car then created not only a lot of jobs creating cars" but everything else that happened because of the car: Paved streets, restaurants, motels, movie theaters, apartment complexes, office complexes, the entire buildout of suburban America, etc. "The jobs that were created by the automobile on the second, third, and fourth order effects were 100X, 1000X the number of jobs that blacksmiths had," he said.

Comments

Re:"It never happens".

[smooth wombat]

we could end up with large numbers people starving

Simple solution. Stop having so many babies. Let the population decline until it stabilizes at a point where there are enough people to fill the jobs with a little slack left over.

That's what happens in the wild. When too many animals are born and there isn't enough food to sustain them, the population dies off until it reaches equilibrium with its environment.

Humans should be no different. Reducing the human population would also have side benefits such as less waste, less resource usage, less overall destruction of our environment. It would also reduce the number of unemployed because with a smaller population, classroom size would also be smaller, thus allowing for more personalized education instead of the cookie cutter approach we have now.

The standard of living should also rise because with a smaller number of people available to fill the open jobs, employers would have to pay higher salaries to attract the people they want. Inflation would also rise, but not at a rate sufficient to offset the gain in salaries. Something lacking in this country for at least the past twenty-five years.