But what jobs are going to exist in a world where almost everything is made by printers and/or robots? It’s a nice panacea to look at the past and say “well we always find something” but past performance isn’t always a predictor. Because the past didn’t have quite this level of technical jump. Previous tech jump went from needing people to do X to needing people to do Y, this round is looking to not need people to do anything other than consume.
India and China have been losing jobs to automation too. The global manufacturing sector is simply using less people to make more stuff.
But jobs have been evolving since the industrial revolution. Before there were millions of manufacturing jobs, there were ions of farming jobs. Now a single person can farm acres of land by themselves and a tractor. Automation killed off most of the farming jobs and they are never coming back. No problem, we moved to the cities.
A hundred years ago they could never have imagined a world with millions of computer jobs and millions of smartphone jobs. Just like now we have no idea what type of jobs we will have 100 years from now or if those jobs will even be on earth.
But I do know that those 1’s and 0’s have added trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy.