In a world where the "Renaissance Man", who knows all of the known human knowledge and possibilities, is now impossible, we are rapidly evolving towards narrower and narrower fields of knowledge and specialization. Dr. DeLong is probably clueless about the details of what professors in other departments know.



Automation applies to mass jobs where the cost of non-rivalrous software can be spread over many jobs, which will eliminate the burger flippers and most factory type jobs. However, every time a new batch of jobs is automated, new specialized unique niche jobs are created (burger flipper repair man, control system tuner, the MD equivalent for figuring out why the robot isn't working, etc). These new jobs are fewer in number but greater in diversity and specialization.



The era of huge numbers of humans doing the same thing has been passing for centuries, as specialization and trade have progressed. We've gone from 90% farming to 2% farming and 98% doing something else divided among thousands of types of jobs. This can continue to the point where most people have a unique "job", and the whole concept of lumped economic variables like "workers" no longer makes sense.



As technology evolves, every new invention interacts with all the existing inventions creating new possibilities. Someone will modify the hamburger flipping robot to turn his worm compost, much like people have modified ink jet printers to deposit living cells and support structure to make human spare parts. For the economist/mathematician, the number of opportunities for new niches grows as N! as each new invention or innovation interacts with all existing inventions creating new opportunities.



This creation of new small specialized niches can increase faster than the job loss rate from the exponential growth in automation ( N! factorial grows faster than exponentials). Any analysis of the automation issue should include a dynamic analysis of the growth rates of opportunities, most of which we can't predict.



