… is from page 271 of economist Tom Lehman‘s excellent article in the Fall 2015 issue of The Independent Review, “Countering the Modern Luddite Impulse“:
It seems the moment we automate some given process with labor-saving devices, we identify some new problem, unresolved issue, or unmet need, and the scarce labor resources that had been employed in the now automated line of work are eventually shifted over to the new problem to address the continued and ongoing struggle against scarcity – all coordinated by price and wage signals emerging from supply and demand in the marketplace. In a world of scarcity, we are not likely to reach an end point where there is no further human work to undertake, no unmet demands, no utopia where all problems are solved or where all problems might be left to automation alone. Even in a world ubiquitous with tablet computers, “smart” devices, smartphone apps, GPS navigators, self-driving automobiles, automated production facilities, drone delivery mechanisms, and other robots, we seem to have a never-ending parade of more complex problems to solve.
