system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Long term technological unemployment is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future

What I mean by "long term technological unemployment" is a scenario where significant portions of the population cannot find work due to technology, and that this persists for a significant period of time(100+ years). This is in contrast to short term technological unemployment, which is when people lose their jobs to technology, but their are still enough jobs for the next generation, due to growth in other fields/new jobs being created. 

I think that short term technological unemployment is going to happen a lot in the next 100ish years. Established industries will be disrupted and their workers will struggle to find jobs as robots will be cheaper/better than them at those jobs. But I don't think that this will be a sustained effect. 

Humanity has basically experienced 2 huge changes in employment in our history. The shift from hunting/gathering to farming, and this shift from farming to industrial/service jobs. Neither of these past technological revolutions caused large portions of the population to stay unemployed for hundreds of years. These new technologies created new jobs/opportunities to employ the next generation of workers, and most people who wanted a jobs could still get one. I see no reason why the current technological revolution (driven by automation/machine learning) is any different. Some jobs will go away, but this new technology will enable jobs that we currently can't even imagine, and most people who want a job will still be able to find one.
gpt
>Neither of these past technological revolutions caused large portions of the population to stay unemployed for hundreds of years.

Not really true. People used to work much more before these innovations and had much more leisure time after them.  

Their work beforehand might not have been seen as 'labor' in the capitalistic sense, but if you define 'work ' as 'doing things you don't want to do in order to survive/raise your quality of life,' then the amount of work the average person does in a day dropped precipitously due to those advances, and has continued to do so.

Right now we consider a 63% labor force participation rate at 20-40 hours a week to be 'full employment', but that's massively less per capita work than we used to do.

We should definitely expect the total amount of available work to continue to decrease with new technological innovations, while the total amount of leisure time available continues to increase.  The question is whether our economy will continue to absorb these changes while maintaining some stable state which we choose to call 'full employment' (maybe with more people dropping out of the labor force or the workweek decreasing or etc), or whether we run into some disruptive catastrophe where employers refuse to pay enough for society to function and the economy falls off a cliff due to lack of demand.