Redundancy is the engine of progress

In the 18th century, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture to feed themselves and the nation. Today, it's around 1%. In the 1950s, there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators. Today, they're all gone. There used to be well over a million professional typists too, but word processing largely killed those jobs as well.This is what progress usually looks like: redundancy.Technological advancement has always rendered some jobs unnecessary. That is literally the progress! Freeing humans from a class of work that used to consume their time and talent so they can pursue new problems.Individually, this isn't a picnic. I'm sure lots of the farm laborers displaced by the combine harvester didn't much care for "progress". They cared about having a job. Same too for the switchboard operators and typists.This isn't just a history lesson either. The Minneapolis City Council just voted to require self-driving cars to have a human "safety monitor". Lots of jobs are on the…