Startup ideas with positive labor market effects?

Question

Lately I've been thinking about how Industrial Revolution tech pulled a lot of people out of poverty. Because railroads and factories were tech that, once it worked, found product-market fit, investment, and rolled out at society-wide scale, employed large numbers of low-skill workers.Today's tech seems to be the opposite. Lots of modern tech startup ideas seem to be about finding low-skill jobs and automating them away.Are there any startup ideas that, if successful, would result in lots of jobs for low-skill workers?Over the years I've met lots of people who'd be good screwing bolts on cars, but regardless of training, I don't think would ever be very good at all at the kind of abstract logical thinking required to be successful software engineers.50 years ago you could get a job right out of high school screwing bolts on cars that paid well enough for a house with a yard, two kids, a non-working spouse and a car or two.Nowadays all the bolts are screwed by robots or overseas, and good luck renting an apartment in an area where you won't get robbed or worse walking home at night, and feeding yourselves without food stamps if you and your spouse both work at Walmart or McDonald's. Kids? Homeownership? Proper medical care? Today such luxuries are for the rich and the software engineers. As the latter, life's not so bad for me personally, but I hate how the lack of opportunity is tearing our society apart.What kinds of Industrial Revolution 2.0 could reverse this trend? What startup idea, if it works, finds product-market fit, investment, and rolls out at society-wide scale, would result in a semi-permanent labor shortage of low-skill workers that enables ordinary people to make a good middle-class living again?(I think PG may have discussed this problem in one of his essays but I don't think he asked exactly the same question I'm asking.)

Shinmon · Accepted Answer

Mh tough but really good question.I think we need to start taxing work done by robots. For every dollar you earn the state takes an income tax. This is not really true for robots, because it's hard to tell how much they "earn".With the money from this tax, you could provide some kind of universal basic income (or something alike).Low skill workers are usually not doing the job because they like it. They do it to survive. Also low skill workers are not necessarily low skill. They just cannot keep up with the increasing amount of tech in every aspect of their work life.They might be wonderful artists, musicians, tutors, ...Taking the feat of surviving away by introducing something like UBI you could unlock a whole new generation of creativity and innovation.