Unemployed ? Get used to it !

The house you live in. Do you want a new one? Well, very soon most houses won't be built on site. You will select the design and it will be prefabricated in a factory. The walls, roof trusses etc. will be delivered to the site and assembled. This happens already but not on a large scale.

How do I know? Because in the late 80's / early 90's my brother had some spare time so he and his wife built a few houses. All the walls and roof trusses were prefabricated and delivered to the site, mounted on bolts sticking out of the concrete slab and bolted together. One afternoon my brother and I erected and bolted together the side of a house. That's right, 4 hours to get half a dozen frames up and bolt them down. And yes, they were very heavy, but I was a lot younger. And that was 25 years ago.

Don't believe me. Check this out. 3D printing for new houses.  A 25 square house being built in 20 hours. Now that's efficient.

On the way to work you probably dropped your daughter at university to get a quality education. But why are they actually going physically to university? Is it for a lecture?

Universities are slowly moving lectures, from a real professor delivering each lecture to a class in a lecture theatre, to simply posting the lecture on Youtube - Desire2Learn. All students can now watch it whenever they want. What does this mean? If you are doing a degree at any university in any English language subject, anywhere in the world, you could all be watching the same video. That's a lot of unemployed professors.

And when your daughter submits her university paper it first goes to Turnitin to be checked for plagiarism. A teacher doesn't do it. A computer does. Simply more efficient.

On the way home, did you stop at the supermarket? Notice how few people now work in supermarkets. My mother used to operate the till and pack groceries at a local supermarket. There was no barcode scanning back then. Both Woolworths and Coles want you to check yourself out at the automated checkouts. Why ? Less people. More efficient.

Perhaps, you stopped at the bank to do some banking. Notice how many tellers there are. Well it is going to become less. Banks are now working on getting the branch staff down to a maximum of 1-2 people per branch and handling most transactions online or by automated teller machines.More efficient.

So simply put, farming, business, manufacturing, logistical and retail efficiency is reducing the number of people needed to perform the work. Which means there are fewer jobs to go around. And on top of this there are more people that need work.

There is always the argument that new technologies bring new jobs. This is true, but all industries, even new ones, are so efficient that they do not need lots of bodies.

Right now at the time of writing the Australian population is 23,693,227 people. See this video to see some trends.

Australiais predicted to reach 70 million people by the end of the century. Melbourne is going to go from 4.2 million in 2012 to approx 8.6 million in 2061.That's only 46 years. See this ABS URL for the details.