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

"It never happens".

[queazocotal]

'Playing Russian Roulette is perfectly safe, I've done five rounds so far'.

The jobs that went away in the past were the trivial ones, where you may literally have been able to replace a person with a transistor or automatic valve. (Elevator/lift operator).
There were plenty of newly available jobs for people of average skill to move into.

The game-changer today is not that any particular field is being automated, but that in many places, the robot is equal to 'the person of average skill'.
If all of the delivery, warehousing, farming, ... jobs go away, that is an enormous hollowing out, with masses out of work.
The new jobs may be around, but increasingly the new jobs leverage computers to solve with a team of 20 (that may get very rich) problems that used to take thousands of employees.

Re:"It never happens".

[interkin3tic]

I suspect the finger pointing at "big government regulations" will dramatically increase as right-wing voters lose jobs. The writing on wall that the coal train isn't going to last forever has been there quite a while, and it's not rocket science that natural gas and automation are causing coal jobs to disappear, yet the useful idiot GOP voters of coal country are still convinced it was Obama deciding he didn't like white people.

Repealing protections will only make the situation worse, as will ripping up trade deals.

At some point, the right wing is going to decide that universal income totally fits into their ideology. To pay for it, we'll end social security, all federal funding will be distributed as block grants and left up to the states to allocate to universal incomes as needed, which will in most red states to be tax cuts to the wealthy. Kansas may be spared this as they seem to have already realized again reganomics don't work.