It’s said that from the dawning of the industrial
revolution in the 19th century, followers of Ned Ludd (Luddits)
protested job-killing technological change. See:
Writing in Saturday’s New York Times (Aug. 24, 2013)
David H. Autor and David Dorn assess the implications of automation. Autor and
Dorn write:
“Labor-saving technological change necessarily
displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in
productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and
services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor.
“In 1900, no one could foresee that a century later health
care, finance, information technology, consumer electronics, hospitality,
leisure, and entertainment would employ far more workers than agriculture….
“Fast-forward to the present. The multi-trillionfold
decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous
incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers
for expensive labor.
“These rapid advances — which confront us daily as
we check in at airports, order books online, pay bills on our banks’ Web sites
or consult our smart phones for driving directions — have reawakened fears that
workers will be displaced by machinery. Will this time be different?”
You can find the whole article at:
Regular readers of my blogsite or my latest book
know my position on the issue of future joblessness:
America ought to be bringing serioius human
brainpower to work figuring out how to deal with the terrible, predictable
negatives of hyper-advanced automation likely to be in place 20, 30, and 50
years from now.
None of those is a great span of time into the
future to me and to those of us who were born in the 1930s or ‘40s or ‘50s and
maybe even the 1960s and ‘70s. We’ve lived long enough to know present and future
time seems to pass slowly and that future time passes in a rush.
I see need for educated guesswork soon (well, now) on
how cheap, massively produced goods and services are to be acquired by a hoard
of desperately poor, unemployable consumers.
I see need for educated guesswork soon (well, now) on what’s to become of capitalism
when our 47% swells into 94%.
I see need for educated guesswork soon (well, now) on what’s to become of life
on a planet populated by desperately poor people with lots of time on their
hands.
Yes, from time to time I do think back on the French
and Russian revolutions.
And yes, I am looking well beyond the present transitional
period (when the newly jobless are being retrained to fill the jobs created by
new technology) into the time when all the information in all the world’s
computers will predictably be built into super-advanced robots which will take
on the design, manufacture, and delivery of ever-smarter robots.
See the New York Times piece at:
If you wish, visit Amazon for the review of my
latest book:
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