Of course it does. That's kind of the point of technology.
Take farm equipment, for example. One combine replaces hundreds of people with sickles. All those people can't find jobs in the combine factory, either.
So what happened? Mass unemployment? No, those people got jobs making automobiles and refrigerators and washing machines and ten thousand other things. The only reason society could do that is because they weren't wasting all those people working on farms.
For a society, jobs cost people. The society can only have the level of material culture it can create with the people it has to spend. If in some area, we can get by with fewer people, that's progress. We can now spend those people on something else, and our society will be richer for it.
That's the high-level view. In the short term, however, if we can't figure out what to spend those people on, it can get bumpy...
Take farm equipment, for example. One combine replaces hundreds of people with sickles. All those people can't find jobs in the combine factory, either.
So what happened? Mass unemployment? No, those people got jobs making automobiles and refrigerators and washing machines and ten thousand other things. The only reason society could do that is because they weren't wasting all those people working on farms.
For a society, jobs cost people. The society can only have the level of material culture it can create with the people it has to spend. If in some area, we can get by with fewer people, that's progress. We can now spend those people on something else, and our society will be richer for it.
That's the high-level view. In the short term, however, if we can't figure out what to spend those people on, it can get bumpy...