Fox News wonders whether we should cancel food stamps because 0.09% of spending is fraudulent

Yeah, but it's not that simple either. If your company employs 50 truckers and 50 programmers, and you eliminate the 50 truckers, you'll initially be down to 50 jobs.

However, you'll have dramatically lowered overhead. Your competitors likely will too, and you'll both offer lower prices on trucking.

The newfound low prices on trucking will likely open up new businesses that take advantage of the cheap infrastructure.

Pretty soon, you find that you're making more business than you did before, and you might end up hiring another 10 or 20 programmers and be up to 70.

That's the thing people forget about technology. When the vacuum cleaner was invented, it didn't eliminate the amount of work people spent cleaning- it raised standards for cleanliness.

When the record was invented, it did kill many orchestra/musical performer jobs overnight. But it also created entirely new jobs around music distribution.

In the software industry, duplication of product is free. Software be duplicated for almost $0. Yet, the software industry has tons of jobs based around services.

Automation potentially will eliminate vast quantities of manual jobs. But in a world where you can "copy/paste" physical products with machinery, you're likely to see all kinds of new businesses pop up as people consume more and more of the cheap product. Service oriented jobs.

I think people who believe in an automation apocalypse are shortsighted. Automation will also increase our demand.

The big problem with automation is that it will redistribute where work is done- to big automated solar-powered robot factories in places like Nevada. If you live in a manufacturing town in the midwest, or an oil town in the south, you're screwed. There's not enough population there to support a lot of service-based economy and their manufacturing jobs will keep going away. And people don't like to move when their jobs do. Automation will benefit cities a lot more than rurals, so I expect a lot of angst.

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