About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company

There's plenty of stuff in the middle it's just been moved overseas and the output is sent back to the US on a shipping container. Chinese and Mexican factory workers != robots. It sounds obvious but the establishment, media, and economists do like to blur the distinction.

> drove horses out of our economy A graph of the process is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784 (it also includes a bifurcation: between draft and sport/companion horses)

I enjoy automating the boring parts of my job - plus if I don't, somebody else will. At least now I can just go on to automate the next thing.

Assuming the world is moving towards more automation and high skilled(not sure this is the right term. But places where you need to be more adaptable and think more) jobs. Also assuming for a moment todays adults are the transitionary generation. How do we prepare the next generation for what is to come? It feels like schools are still stuck in the industrial age. How do we teach them not math and science but the actual act of learning/adapting. Our parents could not predict what the world would look like today, neither can we. How do we educate the next generation on the foundational skills rather than specific skills which they can learn on their own depending on what the situation calls for? This is an idea I am thinking about, so I would love to hear other opinions and thoughts.

I have been contributing to open source software for more than 20 years. My contributions have always been to help save other developers time. How does the impact from that on jobs differ from the impact had by AI tools like LLMs or robotic automation? It certainly /feels/ different, but I'm having a little bit of trouble explaining why.

> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. Or it allowed the employee to shift to more valuable, interesting work rather than menial tasks that could easily be done by a computer.

By that logic every backhoe constructed removes hundreds of jobs of men with shovels. But we instead build.mpre and bigger things using our tools.

> That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job. It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was removed". The company one way or another got more efficient - more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny but this saving was then passed on to every downstream purchaser of the widgets who, with that left over money .... could employ someone else to do something. By the time you add all the net effects back to regain a "closed system", economic theory says you actually have more jobs. But the key here really is that this doesn't account for temporal effects, and especially when there is rapid disruptive change, you can absolutely have a huge dislocation and mismatch of labor supply / demand in the economy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_b…