My brother in law is a collector of Hershey memorabilia. In one black and white picture you can see two or three dozen ladies sitting at desks sorting some cocoa means or something. That process still happens today, but it’s automated, and a handful of workers handle more production than that entire room of hand sorters used to many decades ago.

Our Chairman has said similar things about the massive gains in productivity in the railroad industry. We don’t need nearly as many people working at the railroad to move more quantities of good than we moved in the past. This freed them to do other things when they were invented.

And similar stories are told of the advancement in farming production. All these changes and yet we seem to have the same working schedules we’ve always had. One reason is we have many industries we didn’t have when those jobs were lost.

I believe there come points when massive productivity gains are made where society gets to decide whether it encourages higher pay and leisure or new ways of working with the time that’s been freed by automation. It seems we’ve often chosen to find new ways of working, even to the point where we have a greater percentage of two income households than when many of the above changes in automation occurred.

So I think we’ll find a decision point again when/if AI starts affecting jobs. And if our society and government decides we need more money to replace money from jobs lost to AI and increases the money it gives for earned income or some such program, maybe families can mostly go back to a single income being enough and that’s great.

And if instead our society and government decides we need more jobs to replace ones lost to AI, maybe we get an increase in the quantity of people serving the elderly in healthcare, or providing childcare and household services for the ones with the the high paying jobs that remain. Maybe we add enough cooks to our local restaurants and entertainers to our local theme parks to match the quality you’d see from a trip to Disney. And that would all be just great too.

And maybe from a combination of both of the above societal and governmental actions some new thinkers come along and start entirely new industries.

I still think we have an uncomfortable level of froth in markets, but I don’t think we’re to the point where all society is doomed by this new method of or attempt at increasing productivity.