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.
The difference between this wave of tech and previous ones is that those wave made it so we no longer needed people to do X but we now needed them to do Y. We didn’t need guys running plows behind animals anymore, but we had tractors that needed driving. This wave though has no Y. Look at post 69 and that link. Once we get self driving vehicles fully adopts that’s it, we no longer need the Xs of long or short truck drivers, train conductors, bus drivers, taxi drivers or boat captains. And there’s no Y. Once you can print most of the contents of Target at home we no longer need the Xs of all that manufacturing, all that shipping, and all that selling. And again no Y.
Adding trillions to the economy != making jobs. We’re right now transition to a world where we can have a very high standard of living with very few people actually doing anything. 47% of the populace is on some dole or another, and most of them have smartphones and cable. It’s an interesting world coming.