The meaning of human life, how people will spend their lives, is not the primary goal here, but where investors pursuing their naturally selfish and naturally short-sighted thinking will take us.

It’s interesting that you use the word “naturally” here.  As a parent of two very different children, I can tell you that some people have to be taught to be selfish (and BOY does the USA excel at that!) because they were born “naturally” aware of the benefits of co-operation and generosity.  Others are born with “natural” hoarding tendencies, or a “natural” inability to understand the needs of others, so they have to be taught how disregarding those needs can result in suffering for themselves.

But if you do the math, we could spend the entire energy budget of the world on pushing humans out of the gravity well as efficiently as possible and we still couldn’t match the birth rate.  So those of us who remain on earth are still in the same pickle, only now we have to live in unheated, unlit hovels so that we can afford to launch the spacecraft of the elites.

That’s a bit of an elitist view, to be honest.

I once had a job working for a mortgage company 15 years ago. I managed appraisal orders. I manually found an appraiser (government loans, so a govvy appraiser), created an appraisal order, and shipped out the request via UPS or FedEx. It’s the sort of job that can be completely automated today (and honestly was close to being eliminated by the time I left the company five years later).

But that position, those twelve months, gave me a job, the ability to rent an apartment and get a car, and get a head start into a better position at the company. And that eventually was my kickstart into a long, happy career as an analyst in IT. I also made a ton of friends in my office and across the country, some of which are still friends today.

I’m not saying that I want people to be stuck in bad positions, nor do I think that the AP is right in making technology to be some sort of job-killing boogeyman. But some of the jobs that get eliminated in pursuit of improved productivity aren’t bad jobs, and they’re not held by bad, lazy people. 

Non-recorded online teaching can disrupt in other ways, because removing geographical restrictions might make some processes a bit more effective, but not by much overall, in my view. You might have 100 teachers in 1 location rather than 10 in 10 locations, but (ideally) you’d still have 100 teachers — or more, because of multiple subjects. Teacher’s utilization rates are already through the roof (i.e. they don’t really spend much time idle as it is), and very little of that work is actually due to location.

I guess we will find out about this when the current wave of “modernism” (i.e. doing things online because we can, not because we should) ends, we can study what works and what doesn’t, and hire accordingly.

COME TO OUTER SPACE! THERE IS SPACE FOR EVERYONE*!

*Except your cat, don’t bring your cat.

There will be less and less room for people of ordinary ability, and since Capitalism rewards productivity, we will go on rewarding those elites in areas like Software Engineering who automate good paying jobs recently done by people. When economic systems evolve to become less inclusive, political systems soon follow. The meaning of human life, how people will spend their lives, is not the primary goal here, but where investors pursuing their naturally selfish and naturally short-sighted thinking will take us. I think that it will take us into tyranny unless creative destruction yields new roles uniquely doable by people, even ordinary people. I think that engineers are especially good at triggering unintended consequences. That may work for or against us humans.

If you think that everyone is just going to become a robotics engineer or computer programmer you’re in for a shock.

(Not to mention that we will never need that many of those people anyway.  It’s generally unwise to bet against the future capability of tech.)

Everyone else in my immediate family was in graphic design or pre-press.  Full-time jobs in those areas were decimated by technology.

“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” Alan Watts

But yes, the fundamental equation is when do the costs of weakening popular access to wealth overcome the benefits of using labor increasingly efficiently.

Ultimately, the market has no unimpeachable incentive to keep people employed.

That’s the Ronald Reagan/Milton Friedman mantra, certainly.

But in reality the entire reason for existence of the labor market is to keep the masses employed; it’s the cheapest and most effective way to keep them from rebelling and taking the goods of the rich by force.  If the powerful few just chain everybody else up it costs more, and slaves provide poor quality goods and services compared to freemen.

It’s what it’s all about.  Keeping the majority of people happy and usefully occupied.  Freud said people need “work, play and love” to be happy and productive, and nobody’s proved him wrong yet.  If you ever manage to lock huge numbers of people out of the market by denying them work, your nation will fall, probably bloodily.

It is just a matter of time, at this current rate, actually.

The only reason the US has been able to continue adding jobs to the economy for the last 50 years is by drumming up artificial demand for shit people don’t need

Well, aren’t you a Negative Nancy. Next you’ll be telling me that you don’t like those nice Kardashians. Now, excuse me; I have to polish my wall-mounted singing fish.

I’ve been hearing the claims that technology was destroying all of the jobs in the United States since the 1970s. In the early 1980s I became a software engineer, only to be told that it was going to be a dead industry because soon there would be computer programs that could write all of the computer programs ever needed. This was a pretty mainstream opinion in the trade press for almost a decade.

Of course, what really happened is that large businesses in the United States  started exporting jobs, especially  manufacturing jobs, to other countries where labor was cheaper, all in the name of maximizing corporate profit, and all the while ignoring social responsibility and the long term effects of this behavior. Now cheap labor in the United States is actually bringing some of those jobs back, but the infrastructure is badly damaged.

The vast majority of jobs are not being destroyed by technology, we’re just moving them around, from one cheap labor source to another. What’ll be really interesting though is when really paradigm-changing technology DOES come along—something like the technology described by James Burke in his speech at dConstruct 2012, “Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll”:

http://archive.dconstruct.org/2012/admiralshovel