I'm upvoting this because it's an insanely important topic, but I disagree with almost everything said in it.

First up, "we have better things to worry about". Granted, climate change is a more fundamental and immediate threat, but this is still way up there on the list of things we need to worry about.

"We've been wrong about automation taking jobs in the past"

So what? Until Obama got elected, there was never a black US president. There has never been a woman US president and there won't be.... until there is.

"New technology creates new jobs"
Yeah, and before, we needed humans to fill those jobs. Previously, we created new jobs that automation COULDN'T do. That is no longer the case. Create a new industry? Fine, but it will be staffed by AIs and robots.

They also miss the point with productivity growth. Automation doesn't need to be more productive than human workers. In fact, it can be staggeringly WORSE than human workers, but if your productivity is 10% and your cost is 1%, that's still a win.

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Humans-Need-Not-Apply

Humans Need Not Apply has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine.

Pretty much everything @ChaosEngine said, and as pointed out in the Humans Need Not Apply video. There are far more factors going into this than the economists are willing to look at.

Shelf checkouts might result in slightly higher theft rates, and each person might be at the register than they would be with a properly trained cashier, but you now have one minimum wage employee watching 6 or 12 registers, rather than 6 or 12 people... that is a huge savings. That's 5 to 11 jobs lost, and at the low end, where people can least afford to lose job opportunities. It's just a matter of time until McDonald's, Wendy's and the like all add app-based ordering, or ordering at a kiosk, and that saves a couple employees there (Chick-fil-a already has that in their app, order, notify when you are there, they process the order)... and it wouldn't be too difficult to automate the McDonald's cooking line either... the burgers aren't flipped, the grill cooks both sides at the same time, drop them in place, grill down, cook, up, then put them in the stream tray, easy for a cheap bot to do. Portion control would be far easier with a bot too... there are huge incentives for them to move to automate...

The only real incentive not to automate as fully as everyone can is the fact it would cause a huge disruption to the economy if a Universal Basic Income isn't in place. I'd expect the biggest push for a UBI to eventually come from the various industries that want to automate, who'd gladly pay an automation tax to help pay the UBI in order to greatly increase their bottom lines, because we are very close to where a UBI, even based on an automation tax, is still cheaper than employing people.

Moving this video to ant's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.