<story><title>The Software Revolution</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/the-software-revolution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lkrubner</author><text>I disagree with this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the  industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel&amp;#x27;s work, &amp;quot;The Perspective of the World&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687742&amp;amp;pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&amp;amp;pf_rd_t=201&amp;amp;pf_rd_i=0520081145&amp;amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;amp;pf_rd_r=1SNDA9Y3ZZY1RSP7SSE3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;gp&amp;#x2F;product&amp;#x2F;0520081161&amp;#x2F;ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fairly convinced that eventually there will be two and only two choices: universal income and a shortened work week, or such extreme wealth divisions that stability demands a totalitarian police state resembling the worst sort of comic book cyberpunk dystopia. Age of abundance or feudal hellhole. Your pick. There simply will not be enough economically viable work to sustain any system that demands labor to maintain cash flows. Automation will be too efficient, programmable, adaptable.&lt;p&gt;... I suppose there is a third option: an anti-technology crusade that bans automation to restore employment. But a make-work economy sucks, and is not likely to succeed in the long term.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Software Revolution</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/the-software-revolution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lkrubner</author><text>I disagree with this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in India, in the Ottoman empire, in China... almost everywhere that had once been a famous textile center. The idea that the  industrial revolution did not cause unemployment is an illusion that is caused by looking at only one nation state. But Britain was the winner of the early industrial revolution, and it was able to export its unemployment. And because of this, a breathtaking gap opened up between wages in the West and wages everywhere else. The so-called Third World was summoned into existence. You can get some sense of this by reading Fernand Braudel&amp;#x27;s work, &amp;quot;The Perspective of the World&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520081161/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687742&amp;amp;pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&amp;amp;pf_rd_t=201&amp;amp;pf_rd_i=0520081145&amp;amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;amp;pf_rd_r=1SNDA9Y3ZZY1RSP7SSE3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;gp&amp;#x2F;product&amp;#x2F;0520081161&amp;#x2F;ref=pd_lpo_sbs_d...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The software revolution will be similar with some nations winning and many others losing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not so much that the industrial revolution &lt;i&gt;net&lt;/i&gt; created jobs -- like you, I&amp;#x27;m not sure it did (even domestically). It&amp;#x27;s that the industrial revolution not only created jobs, it created the modern &lt;i&gt;labor market&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Before it happened you had a much more distributed economy with many much smaller centers of production (many at the household level or close) in agriculture, trades, and craft manufacturing.&lt;p&gt;Afterwards in any domestic industry where economy of scale was a competitive advantage, you had a small number of much larger centralized producers. Almost certainly with many fewer jobs in actual production (consolidation corresponding to efficiencies of scale). If there was any net gain over time since it would have been in new products being made and some new support positions needed. It is not clear to me there was ever a trend to a net gain over timescales longer than a two decades or so.&lt;p&gt;So by and large it moved us to an economy with a profusion of increasingly competitively manufactured products to buy, and selling labor itself is the de facto form of subsistence rather than direct production.&lt;p&gt;I think you&amp;#x27;re correct that there&amp;#x27;s always been some externalization of unemployment and a lot of the visibility depended on industry specifics. This isn&amp;#x27;t new. But what is new is that software gives us essentially a higher order of automation that means (a) it sure looks like we&amp;#x27;re automating out old jobs even faster than we&amp;#x27;re creating new ones and (b) with more unemployment we get fewer places to externalize it. :&amp;#x2F;</text></comment>