Alibaba's Jack Ma backs down from promise to Trump to bring 1 million jobs to the US

[Benton]

(09-20-2018, 03:26 PM)Au165 Wrote: No not all jobs, but a lot of jobs that require little or no no specialized skill. Trucking is being attacked by the driver less car industry, Warehouse workers will be replaced by sorting robots soon as Amazon pushes hard, Food service is already testing the kiosks and automated cooking robots. I think you are under estimating how much can easily be replaced by robots.  What it does is the same thing it has always done when tech comes in, even advancements in machinery, it shifts jobs from unskilled labor to semi skilled. What we continue to hunt for is a resurgence in unskilled labor and it simply will not come back. This however is probably it's own thread as it could go on and on. 

To the point of this thread though just not a fan of Tariffs, especially in a trade war with a country that can hit us back almost as hard. 

Sometimes easily, but ... again... that's not really the discussion. Some jobs can't. And some companies can't afford to automate. 

The trick is incentivizing companies not to automate or outsource. Right now, we've tipped well out of balance in favor of capitalism. Maximizing profits is the only incentive, and that's resulted in hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of jobs overseas and billions taken out of the economy. Businesses should get tax breaks for creating jobs and building a healthy economy, not just because they paid off lawmakers. Those unskilled jobs are out there, we just haven't given businesses a reason to keep them here; instead we gave them a reason to export them.

Fear of modernization has been around a long time. It changes industries and creates new ones, but there will likely always be a need for cheap unskilled labor.