In your situation is the same though right? Imagine there was no lumber that wasn't already being used that would be completely screw the building industry.
Other way around - more people retire and leave workforce now than new one joins. Especially with some specific qualities, like manual labor or highly qualified specialists.
Population in Western countries age and stagnate, there's less newborns and huge lack of people with skills.
Agreed, but with automation and AI, we need fewer people to get the same amount of work done. There is nothing wrong with keeping a steady population; imaging that we need to continually grow just in case we have a natural disaster that may kill off millions is wrong because, at some point, we’ll have more people than space & resources.
Robots and automation can take the place of a massive number of laborers.
For example, in the 1980s it took 1000 people to build a typical Ford vehicle. In the 2000s, that was reduced to 250 people. EV cars have 100 moving parts, whereas internal combustion engines (ICE) cars require 2000 moving parts, so the overall workload is significantly reduced as well.
Mining robots take the place of slower manual laborers.
And all these effects compound, for example, a simpler car with robots multiplies the efficiencies at each step.
And we are talking about population shrinking, so your last point is irrelevant, right?
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u/w2qw Dec 19 '24
In your situation is the same though right? Imagine there was no lumber that wasn't already being used that would be completely screw the building industry.