>>ageing Cheddar
This is going too far. How are we supposed to get that dirty farmer socks taste in the gruyere cheese if it's all handled by robots?
This thread, though, has had more than one surprise. I was going to post earlier that one of these days I'm going to look for a closeup of the apple picker. My very first paid labor (age 10-13) was working in the apple orchards and picking without damaging the tree takes a little practice. Not like picking raspberries or something more fragile, but still.
I'm not really sure how to think about all this. Just off the top of my head...
Policy and politics have, for so long, been focused on creating jobs. But we are entering a world of very very low birth rates in the rich world, and the big challenge in absence of technological change is creating workers. But of course we are not in the absence of technological change, as this thread demonstrates.
So I guess there is a sort of race between falling birth rates and rising robotics (and immigration fits in here too). Falling birth rates is an asymptotic process (asymptote at zero). Automation cost and deployment are probably exponential processes, though perhaps with smaller exponents than, say, Moore's Law. Still eventually anything exponential is likely to be a shock and overwhelm a linear or asymptotic process.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. Up until about 1975, benefits from increases in productivity were shared broadly across society in the rich world. Since 1975, especially in the US, benefits from increases in productivity accrued almost entirely to the shareholding class, and mostly the high end of that class.
