Weighing whether there are too many or too few jobs
There is much debate about the future of jobs in the US and the AI / robotics revolution. This article explains we won't run out of jobs, but the nature of work will change.
Will there be too few or too many jobs in the future? We are told as a result of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution with endless robots, autonomous vehicles, etc. that there will be far fewer jobs. Yet last week, despite record levels of automation, the Department of Labor announced that the country had reached the point where there were more jobs available than people seeking work.
At the time of the American Revolution, three-quarters of all Americans worked on farms; now it is 1.5 percent. A century ago, in 1918, despite a much smaller population, there were four times as many Americans working on farms than there are today, yet they each produced only about one-fifteenth as much food as today’s farmer.
Where did all of the farmers go? The first farm machines, like the reaper, were developed in the early 1800s. But it was not until the 1850s that entrepreneurs like Cyrus McCormick built the first mass-production farm machinery companies. During the industrial revolution, there were many commentators decrying how the new machines would destroy all of the jobs. It didn’t happen — many more new jobs were created. (There was one big loser, and that was the draft horse — which stopped being bred.)