alt Hacker News>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.
Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.
>In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc.
The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population.
>preindustrial societies
Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.
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> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before.
that's a common trope, and its both true and false
true: more bank employees after ATM's
false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
> Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before.
Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.
Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.