User:Three-quarter-ten/Technological unemployment

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The relationship of automation to unemployment is a multivariate one, and people's ideas about its nature in their time, as well as their predictions about the future, have varied widely (and have often been wrong). Nevertheless, humanity continues to try to develop theory that adequately explains the relationship, because it has significant potential to affect economies and modes of life throughout the world.

Mechanization and automation enhance productivity, allowing more products to be made, or other work to be done, faster and with less human effort, and therefore they typically displace workers in some (but not all) areas of employment. The central question has always been whether and where those workers will find new employment. For two centuries, new employment has always been found; during that time, entire new industries and job descriptions have arisen.

The central fear has always been that no new jobs, or not enough new jobs, would arise to fill the void. The earliest versions of this fear predicted that this effect would begin immediately. They turned out to be wrong, and their expected immediate massive unemployment never arose. Later versions of the fear have usually posited that automation would cause unemployment to rise gradually and insidiously. This concept has been discussed by many thinkers, some trained as economists and others not. Variants of this fear persist through the present day, as do refutations of it.^[1][2]

The central hope has always been that, although automation would reduce numbers of jobs, it would not reduce, and would even improve, standard of living, and would provide humanity with unprecedented leisure opportunity and material comfort. This has in fact occurred in many ways. Various mechanisms for how resources would be traded or allocated in such an environment have been posited. The foremost is that new types of jobs would always arise to replace old types lost. This has in fact happened for two centuries.

The fact that for two centuries no permanent, structural unemployment has ever been proven to result from automation has supported an economic concept that automation can never cause it. This view is dominant in economics today, and the idea that automation can cause such unemployment is considered a fallacy in conventional economic theory. However, there are also many people who believe that this theory is incorrect, and that despite the empirical record thus far, the future could be different. These arguments usually make reference to the rapid (and accelerating) pace of advance of information technology, which may produce qualitatively different results than earlier kinds of automation produced, if the advantages of humans over machines keep dwindling.