[ExI] retrainability of plebeians

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

2009/4/20 Dagon Gmail <dagonweb at gmail.com>:

<snip>
>
> Or will this never happen? No personal attacks please, "for now".
>
> (Best source: marshall brain articles)

### Marshall Brain has no idea. Structural unemployment of the
able-bodied non-insane persons is a side-effect of government
regulation, and it has nothing to do with technology. The amount of
useful work that can be performed by humans is always larger than
their ability to perform. As soon as one specific job is "destroyed"
by technological change, another job opens. And the reasoning is quite
simple - Jobs exist because they fulfill human desires but there are
always more desires than there are resources (including humans) needed
to make them come true. If an easier way of fulfilling a human desire
is found, it will increase the amount of resources or decrease their
use in fulfilling the desire. The extra resources are not destroyed -
since there are always more desires available to soak up resources
(including workers), the resources will be used to satisfy yet another
unfulfilled desires, and not destroyed (i.e. sent to a concentration
camp).

This is why we don't have 98% unemployment even though close to 98% of
jobs in farming have been destroyed by technological progress. I bet
there were plantation owners worrying about the masses of dumb farm
workers that would become unemployable with the advent of the steam
threshing machine and such. The present robot scare is exactly as
uninformed as the original Luddism, which was based on the same
premise applied to English machine shops 300 years ago.

Rafal


does not means that the resources used to pay that particular worker