I've been... I don't want to say thinking about this. I should say "rattling this around my head." What I mean by that is having random thoughts, some of which contradict each other with one opinion sometimes undercutting another. But here are some thoughts. I'm curious to get responses.
>>throughout modern history
Yes and no. For a historian, "modern history" means everything since 1500. I'll assume you mean more recent than that. Still, I think it bears mentioning that in the early phases of industrialization, the various forms of automation often increased human drudgery.
One way you could think of it is that before industrialization, machines (plows, sickles, hammers, saws) were appendages of humans. With industrialization, humans became appendages of machines. Factory work involved more drudgery and suffering than the artisanal work it replaced. True, it also brought with it a lot more wealth and it required fewer and fewer people to do drudge work. So in that sense, yes, it liberated millions, maybe billions of people from drudgery and allowed them to become SEOs. But for the ones who continued to do that work, it was more soul crushing than ever.
This was basically the position of the Luddites and they were mostly right. It also underlies Steinbeck's description of "the tractor man" in Grapes of Wrath. I've been reading some Wendell Berry lately and that's a big topic of his as well.
We're seeing a similar thing now. I worked in a warehouse for a year in 1987-1988. It was actually a good job. Lots of time alone with my thoughts. If we reached the end of the day and hadn't shipped all our orders, we clocked out and showed up an hour early the next morning. Sure, I was on my feet all day, but it was nothing like the soul-crushing work people do in a much more automated Amazon warehouse today.
Automation means it takes fewer people to do that job, but it may mean that for the ones who are left, the work becomes worse and more drudgery.
>> outpace our ability to adapt?
I think that's a given. Again, the Luddites are a good example. It was true that in the long run the industrialized weaving raised the living standards. However, the actual displaced workers were worse off than their fathers. But here's the bad part - so were their children. The benefits finally accrued to their grandchildren.
This is a good article
HOW HARD WILL THE ROBOTS MAKE US WORK?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155254/automation-robots-unemployment-jobs-vs-human-google-amazonSimilar
Robots were supposed to take our jobs. Instead, they’re making them worse.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22557895/automation-robots-work-amazon-uber-lyftSo your daughter is not wrong to voice her concern. Of course, she has some incredible advantages over other kids. Above all she has you as a father. But still, her concern makes sense.
>> structural problems... grunt work for a living.
This is the part that I've been thinking about. There are a couple of narratives that I hear a lot. One concerns the need to educate young people so they can qualify for better jobs. The other, very similar, is the need to retrain older people so they can qualify for better jobs.
That makes sense if we are talking about a coal miner whose skills are entirely wrapped up in coal mining. That job (hopefully) won't exist and that person will need a new job and as a society I don't think it's fair that our climate agenda should fall so heavily on the shoulders of people who can least afford it.
On the other hand, there will always be unskilled jobs. It only takes a couple of days to train someone to drive a small snowplow, but that is a job that is going to be super hard to automate. We will need people to do that job.
To me the solution is not training people to do more skilled labor, it is recognizing that people who do unskilled labor should make a living wage.
Similarly, there are some jobs that will always be seasonal. A national park simply cannot function without seasonal labor. If those people have a winter job at a ski area, that means they typically need to choose jobs that do not have seasonal overlap and since seasons are unpredictable, it means they really can only work 9-10 months per year. Even worse, their work will be at most 6 months for any one organization, which means no benefits in the messed up US system. And these are not necessarily unskilled jobs and they are not jobs you can automate -- ski lift mechanics and law enforcement rangers and so on.
So we have a rich society where people want to visit national parks, go skiing, go to golfing, go to Disneyland, but our solution to the bad pay of the jobs that make those things function is to educate and train those employees out of those jobs into a different one.
What is the end point of that? The logical end point of the "train them for better jobs" strategy is to shut down all the parks and ski areas and golf courses because all those people have other jobs that are not crappy seasonal jobs.
Somehow as a society, we have to decide that we value parks and therefore value the people who make them run. We value snow removal, and therefore value the people who remove it. I see the "train them all to be coders" mentality as a complete dead end, not because it won't work (though it won't), but because if it DID work, it would basically take away from us many of the things those of us with a bit of money and leisure value doing with that money and leisure. It's a cultural dead end.
>> dangerous political unrest
That is the essential point, the prize to keep your eyes on. It's where the extreme libertarians just fail. At a certain point, a society becomes unstable. The welfare society exists not so much because of a deep-rooted sense of fairness, but because it is one of the cheapest ways to keep people out of your living room with pitchforks and torches. Desperate people do desperate things and once you go too far down that road, it can be very hard to climb your way back to a peaceful and civilized society.
