Quote:
Originally Posted by Tamara
I think the world needs bakers, delivery men, etc. If we didn't have these people, how would you get a coffee and pastry at Starbucks? How would UPS deliver a package without deliverymen? How would roads/houses/cars/etc get built without tradespeople? Besides, not every kid is cut out to be an academic or has interest in being one.
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That pastry you bought from Starbucks was hardly made by a baker. Even in the food industry, those making the money are the engineers designing better automated factories, not the cooks themselves. They've taken cooking and turned it into an engineering problem.
Deliveries are backed by engineers building tools helping to optimize the routes that drivers take to save gas, avoid traffic, and so on. Further automation could cut out the driver to some extent going forward, depending on how regulations and technology work out in the next few decades.
Yes, we need people in the service industry, can't get rid of that, and plenty of labor intensive industries that aren't going away anytime soon, but we (the US) are transforming into a service-oriented economy where automation or outsourcing drastically change the face of the types of labor jobs available here in the US. Demand for thinkers will continue to increase, while labor gets marginalized as more and more industry becomes automated.
My region will still hire you if you can do accounting, program a computer, or design a circuit board... but if you drive a truck, bake cakes, and so on, get back to the end of the line of everyone else trying to do the same.