As more jobs become automated, UBI will become a necessity to prevent the collapse of civilization.
Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.
> Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs. This time it seems that it's the other way around.
> The industrial revolution replaced a smaller number of high (kind of) skilled jobs with a large number of low skilled jobs.
No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.
Yes you're right, now that I read it doesn't make sense.. I guess what I wanted to say is that is that at least initially it replaced a huge number of medium paying jobs with a large number of low paying and a small number of extremely well paying jobs.
Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875.
Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
You are correct about the dynamics of wage labor during the industrial revolution. However, I can't say I agree with this:
> Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.
Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.