The robots are not threatening your job

Washington Post ^ | 04/10/2015 | By Catherine Rampell

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The Great Robot Freakout of 2015 has begun, and it looks a lot like the robot freakouts that came before it.

In a new survey by CNBC, Americans were asked how concerned they were, if at all, that their jobs could be replaced by technology in the next five years. The level of automation angst was astonishing: About 1 in 8 workers indicated was worried about being displaced. Among those earning less than $30,000, it was a whopping 1 in 4.

No doubt these workers have seen travel agents, bank tellers, typists, mid-skilled manufacturing workers and other occupations of yore dissolve into a pixelation of zeroes and ones, causing them to worry about their own livelihoods. Media fear-mongering about the rise of our robot overlords feeds the anxiety. But there are reasons to be optimistic about the role that technological progress will play in our economy and in helping our workforce, provided policymakers get their acts together.

Droid dread is nothing new. It goes back hundreds, arguably thousands, of years. Sometimes it has manifested itself in science fiction and other narrative lore, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian 1952 novel “Player Piano” or the 16th-century legend of the Golem of Prague. Often it has been voiced by workers and their intellectual champions. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes fretted about the possibility of “technological unemployment.”

Nineteenth-century textile workers and farmers, including the original “Luddites,” smashed the power looms and threshing machines that stole their jobs during the Industrial Revolution. Even Aristotle mused that if “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

[Chode]

it's coming...