1/24/14

On Technology and disappearing Jobs

"...As more and more automated machinery (robots, if you like) are brought in to generate efficiency gains for companies, more and more jobs will be displaced, and more and more income will accumulate higher up the corporate ladder. The inequality gulf will widen as jobs grow permanently scarce—there are only so many service sector jobs to replace manufacturing ones as it is—and the latest wave of automation will hijack not just factory workers but accountants, telemarketers, and real estate agents.

...Creative and skilled jobs done by humans were the most secure—think pastors, editors, and dentists—but just about any rote task at all is now up for automation. Machinists, typists, even retail jobs, are predicted to disappear...

...there's typically a disruptive cycle when new technologies displace old ones, and replace old jobs with new ones. But this time, that cycle is one-sided—so far, there are a lot fewer jobs being created in the new information-based economy than the old manufacturing-based one:

Last year, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were worth over $1 trillion combined, but employed just 150,000 people.

All of this points towards an uncomfortable prospect: in our globalizing, technologically advanced, and inequality-laden world, we risk becoming the cyber-peasants tending (or loitering on, more likely) the feudal lawn of the machine-owning rich."

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rich-and-their-robots-are-about-to-make-half-the-worlds-jobs-disappear

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When recently asked about raising minimum wage, this is what Bill Gates had to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLHwMlfximg

This fits right in to what you are saying, George. Some call it transhumanism or the singularity. Whatever it is, its coming!

Tommy