Input Junkie

Both sturgeonslawyer and supergee have raised the question, so here goes:

I don't know what constrains the number of jobs--it obviously has something to do with the amount of capital, and the mostly accurate expectation the work done today will get paid well enough for more of it to be done tomorrow, but I don't have a feelng for the large picture. Maybe someday I'll reread _Man, Economy, and State_--I don't remember what Rothbard said about the question, but I'm pretty sure he addressed it.

However, I can think of a number of things worth doing which could work as jobs, which probably aren't going away anytime soon, and that people could get paid to do if we were a little richer or had a little more sense. It may be that people won't work as hard or as continuously, but there really are things for them to do.

Help desks could be better staffed with better trained people. Hospitals could be made into places that are good for sick people, though I grant that might lead to less work in the long run.

Buildings could be ornmented. I don't know why the Victorians could afford prettier buildings than we seem to be able to.

Clothing and shoes could be custom fitted--I'm imagining this done with considerable assistance from computers and automation, but needing human thought too.

There's science--we certainly haven't observed everything worth thinking about. Imho, one of the big frontiers is microbial ecology.

And even though everyone reading this lj probably has close to enough stuff, something like a billion people are living in dire poverty--supplying them with stuff will take a while.

We're closer to wild animals or they're closer to us. Afaik (with an exception of Bisson's non-realistic "Bears Discover Fire), science fiction has assumed a fairly sterile future, even when it became obvious that anything that can kill a 100-pound deer can also kill a person, and that there's no good way to keep deer out of the suburbs, especially if you're going to insist on having woods anywhere near where people live, and people do seem to be insisting on that.

Also, I strongly suspect that we've been selecting wild animals for intelligence.

And the predictions about computers were pretty indequate. E.M. Forester had it in "The Machine Stops" (1909) that people would use computers for chatter--but the field completely forgot that insight.

No one guessed what would be easy and what would be difficult--grand master chess has turned out to be a more solvable problem than vision and walking. Once upon a time, science fiction writers seemed to think that your first problem with a computer was keeping it from trying to take over the world rather than getting it to to work at all.

And no one had the foggiest that there would be whole sections of books for the general public on dealing with computers, nor that computers would make it reasonably easy for people to have a combined printing press and post office at home and this would be problematic.

Afaik, no one in science fiction has taken a real crack at just how complicated nanotech is going to be.