Creative Destruction and Technology

Andy Kessler at the WSJ makes the argument that the emerging technologies of fracking, 3D printing, gene therapy, blood markers, crowd funding, and robots will end up creating far more jobs than they destroy.

I'm pretty optimistic but I'm not sure I necessarily buy the argument that technology will always create more jobs than it destroys - but I'm pretty certain the jobs they do create will be higher paying, requiring more creative capacity than ever before. Read the whole thing:

The road to wealth does indeed pass through the graveyard of today's jobs. But history shows that better, higher paying jobs are always created by technology—even if no one seems to remember this during periods of creative destruction.

The trick is to lower the cost of new machines and inventions that can do things never before possible, making them available for wide use.