Since we have intelligent vs stupid, I assume industrious is given as the opposite of lazy. So industrious really means hard working.
And hard working can be dangerous. Very, very intelligent workaholics are responsible for some of the most expensive, least efficient work I've ever seen. No matter how hard and difficult, and too complicated things get, they just roll up their sleeves and go to work. And using their super intellect, they can manage it. But everyone else is hurt by that.
Maybe you thought industrious meant inventive, or creative. But if it means only hard working. Then intelligent and hard working is a dangerous combination. Often successful but at a huge cost. Smart and lazy is just as often successful, but without those huge costs.
When smart and lazy people get hard work, they think of ways to make it easier. That's where we get the old saying that civilization advances only thanks to lazy people. Hard working people just put up with however hard or inconvenient work is, lazy people get creative.
Think of all the job titles that didn't exist 30 years ago (social media marketer, seo specialist, etc
I like that you picked those two because they happen to be two that are already disappearing.
Search engines have been fighting SEO for years. And they have pretty much won. SEO was a hot industry just a few years ago, and is already disappearing.
And social media specialization of marketing and PR was taken on by very young people and thought to be a special skill, until recently. But already businesses have figured out that there is nothing special about it. And every marketer is expected to be a social media expert. It's not creating more new jobs, it's just adding those skills to existing jobs.
It's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it probably isn't.
I am sorry, but to me that argument sounds just like the future will be the same as the past. It's not exactly wrong, it's just an intellectually lazy argument to make.
Just one example of this time it's different is the income split between labor and capital. Historically it had been fixed at 70/30. This is across all industries, and all nations, since the industrial revolution. But now labor's share is down to just 62%. And that's happening in places like China and Mexico too, so it can't be simply due to offshoring. Source: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588900...
Secondly, the number of jobs and job titles is entirely arbitrary.
That's not at all true. Automation has always created unemployment. There was no such thing as 3rd world before the industrial revolution. The economies of countries like China and India, which realized on a lot of textile production, collapsed when the industrial revolution took off in the UK. The UK exported both goods and unemployment. And what we call the 3rd world was brought into existence. We are seeing a very similar process today with Germany and the Southern belt of the EU. Germany too is exporting both its product and its unemployment.
If the advance of technology was truly putting people out of work, don't you think it would be evident by now?
Yes, I do. But I don't think we'd see the unemployment rate go up. I am sure we'll first see labor's share of income drop, and wages should stagnate. Which is quite similar to what we are indeed seeing right now.
Automation rarely replaces 100% of human workers. What tends to happen is that it replaces 99% of humans, does work that's almost identical to human work, and the 1% of humans left fix the machine work so it is identical to what 100% human workers would have done.
It's already happening in translation. Instead of a human translator translating an entire text. They simply first feed the text through translation software. That does a pretty decent job, but still makes mistakes. However, the mistakes are obvious to the human translator. Who now just fixes the translation. Most of the work is done by the machine. And a firm with 10 human translators can get rid of 9 of them, and still be as productive as it was it was with all 10 people.
This pattern of automation replacing almost all, but not exactly all, human workers is seen in many industries.
The problem with ads is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons. Each individual advertiser wants to be more prominent. All together virtually force you to block ads. In special cases, when a third party reviews all ads, as on PennyArcade, the ads tend to be much less annoying.
Sure the developing world still needs very cheap phones, and they require software close to the hardware.
But in the developed world phones and tables get closer to a full PC every day. They basically are tiny PCs.
And exactly how the web made Windows and OSX, and Linux less interesting, so it will make the mobile OSs less interesting.
Because even if you can't get close to the hardware, and might require user permissions to access hardware features, still a java script and HTML5 based web app can do almost anything you want on mobile hardware. History keeps repeating itself.
Couldn't it be because her skills are obviously being underutilized? Society could benefit from her a lot more, and she could get more resources at the same time, but for what ever reason that's not happening. And that is rationally upsetting.
People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.
It's quite a leap from Archimedes getting murdered to fear your ideas might be copied. Ideas can't be stolen. And if you really are motivated by wanting to make the world a better place, even copying your ideas shouldn't stop you.
Peace and rule of law are necessary. Rent seeking with over powered copyright laws and patents, not so much.
I am not sure how that could be prevented without reducing inequality. And I don't see how to raise the income of lower educated people in a world which is ever more automated.