Barely related, but this kind of relates to my fear of increased automation and unemployment this time around. In past periods, like during the Industrial Revolution, the jobs lost by automation were eventually replaced by new jobs as people used the lower prices to consume more. Making clothes needs less labour and so gets cheaper, so consumers buy more clothes, which needs more labour - this but on the scale of the whole economy. Of course it wasn’t this simple (jobs created in other industries, switching industries is hard, new jobs take a while to form, displaced workers never recover, etc.), but given enough time it worked out.
The difference this time is that consumers now spend a ton of money on digital goods for which there’s a weaker relationship between increased consumption and jobs. Unlike physical goods where increasing consumption requires new factories & jobs, digital goods are a zero-margin product. If you doubled the number of gamers in the world you wouldn’t have a ‘game shortage’, you’d still have the insane amount of selection you find on Steam. Yes there’d be more opportunities for profitable niche games but you wouldn’t double the number of game developers as the generic mass-market games would also double their revenue despite not needing to hire anyone new.
Add onto this that:
As the world gets more developed there are more gamers coming in but also more game developers, often able to work for lower salaries.
Older games can stay competitive long after they’ve been made. How old is Skyrim and it’s still selling well? How many game developers are being paid to work on it still?
To tie it all together, basically I worry that this time around we may not create enough new jobs as a result of automation. The current number of game developers is more than enough to satisfy market needs and making games cheaper isn’t going to result in people buying enough new games to make replacement jobs for game developers. I used gaming as my example here but this also holds for music, TV, movies, software, etc. The one silver lining that keeps me from despair is that this can be solved by shorter workweeks which would both help spread out the remaining jobs while also giving consumers more time to consume digital goods.