I see the sarcasm, but it's worth an answer anyway: no. If you're primarily concerned with job creation then the last thing you want are "labour-saving devices." You want people doing everything manually -- think of digging ditches with spoons instead of backhoes.
For people to prosper -- for the standard of living to go up -- you need more productivity, or more stuff produced per unit of input. Increased productivity means that last decade's innovative thing gets better understood and the process of making it more reproducible, and now making that thing becomes a well-understood process needing fewer people.
Now people need to find new jobs, but that also means that we're producing more things with less effort than when we started. We aren't able to disconnect "innovation" from "creative destruction." Whole companies get created, flourish, and die because of this lifecycle.
Understanding this made me a lot less resentful about my career, and helped me to better anticipate my next moves.
chuckmckinnon t1_ivmkrtj wrote
Reply to comment by Turtley13 in More people are employed in clean energy than in fossil fuels by kickresume
I see the sarcasm, but it's worth an answer anyway: no. If you're primarily concerned with job creation then the last thing you want are "labour-saving devices." You want people doing everything manually -- think of digging ditches with spoons instead of backhoes.
For people to prosper -- for the standard of living to go up -- you need more productivity, or more stuff produced per unit of input. Increased productivity means that last decade's innovative thing gets better understood and the process of making it more reproducible, and now making that thing becomes a well-understood process needing fewer people.
Now people need to find new jobs, but that also means that we're producing more things with less effort than when we started. We aren't able to disconnect "innovation" from "creative destruction." Whole companies get created, flourish, and die because of this lifecycle.
Understanding this made me a lot less resentful about my career, and helped me to better anticipate my next moves.