Does technology destroy jobs or create jobs?
Technology generally improves efficiency, in practice, this means cheaper goods, so your earnings generally go further. If you work in an industry that is being automated then it may affect your own livelihood. However, this said, most then go into a different sector (with some disruption to income in-between). Generally, there are many more sectors to go into due to technology but tend to be more the marketing or organisation rather than the production of goods which are increasingly produced by machines. When someone resumes employment they benefit from being able to purchase many more cheaper goods due to automation.You can’t stop this, it is just an economic certainty, if a company can reduce its costs it will. If they do not, others will and the company that does nothing become less competitive and in the ultimate analysis eventually fails. Those that try to protect their markets, generally fair badly, there pricing is propped up by imposing external duties and tariffs to protect internal markets. When trade agreements come into place, these industries are then exposed to international competition and they rarely have any manoeuvrability to reduce prices to compete and fail.Constructively, if someone is made redundant due to machine automation it may be an excellent opportunity to do something entirely different and you may find yourself with a new and worthwhile career. There is also an argument if you can't beat them, join them and set up a company to exploit machine automation for your own benefit.Consider this a different way, the word Sabotage (come from the French word for wooden clogs that were worn in spinning mills), they were thrown into the machines at the onset of the industrial revolution! Using manual labour cloth and clothes cost a small fortune (think 10% of your salary) and most people could only afford two suits of clothes! Now textiles are fantastically cheap and abundant. Would you want to go back to spending 10% of your salary for two changes of attire? That's automation, it brings with it massive efficiency gains. It has its advantages.
As of today, could someone taking over Elon Musk’s job make Tesla profitable without getting a huge loan?
Yes. Sure. But it would probably tank TSLA stock and badly damage their brand.All they have to do is let all the underway fixes get worked in, and cancel investment in everything else that is not immediately revenue producing.Semi trucks and roadsters? Nope.Self-driving cars? Nope.Ridesharing software? Nope.Roof tiles with solar cells under them? Nope.Recharging networks across the world? Nope.Factory expansion? Nope.Unfortunately, much of their stock valuation is based on “momentum” and “perceived upside,” so if you cut all that savvy development to make short term profits, you end up with a relatively limited market for Tesla products, and the stock price would probably be halved.The difference between Musk and “someone else,” is that Musk is smart, aggressive, determined to have a big impact on the world, and sets ridiculously high goals for change so that if his teams achieve even 2/3rds the goal in 1.5x the time, they still will have outpaced the rest of the industry.Tesla’s Market cap is ~$47 Billion this week, so, it kind of works.Tesla says they will be profitable by (I think it’s) September, so that’s really not too long to wait.Btw, Musk owns so many shares that it’s really unlikely anyone but him could get enough votes from the board to do the CEO job.
When will more people realize that minimum wage jobs are also minimum skill jobs? You want more pay, increase your skill set. LEARN A?
Compensation for employees is not based on what a particular employee "needs". It is based on factors such as: How difficult is the task to be performed; how many people can perform the task; how much demand is there for these people. Jobs that require simple tasks (flipping burgers, cutting grass, mopping floors) that almost anyone can perform pay less than operating a lathe, driving a truck or most construction jobs because of the number of people capable of doing them.
If robots take over our jobs and we have no income, wouldn't businesses, such as entertainment, leisure, housing, tourism and others, close down because we don't have money to buy their products/services? Wouldn't the world economy suffer?
We have seen productivity rise steadily over the past few decades, but wages are stagnating or decreasing. This means the gains we make from new technologies are all being redirected to owners and executives, not going to workers in the form of increased wages. As the owners and executives make more money, inequality increases and the cost of capital decreases. So not only are most workers’ wages not increasing like we would want (since businesses are more profitable due to new technologies), but also their money has less purchasing power (it takes more cash to buy goods than it used to). This is already our reality coming out of the 1st industrial revolution and heading into the second (robots and AI). There is no reason to believe this will change without major policy changes.So if things continue as they are, more robots = more productivity and profitability for businesses, but no increase in wages for workers. We can expect inequality to continue to grow, cost of capital to continue to decrease, and therefore the purchasing power of most workers to decrease.