Posted on 12/18/2014 2:01:54 PM PST by dennisw
Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology would create as many jobs as it destroyed. Now many are not so sure.
At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to peoples rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that The Los Angeles Times published.
Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years allowing machines to mimic the human mind are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.
Economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology would create as many jobs as it destroyed. Now many are not so sure.
And over the same 15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, recently said that he no longer believed that automation would always create new jobs. This isnt some hypothetical future possibility, he said. This is something thats emerging before us right now.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said, This is the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.
Mr. Brynjolfsson and other experts say they believe that society has a chance to meet the challenge in ways that will allow technology to be mostly a positive force. In addition to making some jobs obsolete, new technologies have also long complemented peoples skills and enabled them to be more productive as the Internet and word processing have for office workers or robotic surgery has for surgeons.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No, but the Los Angeles Times might have.
Thanks for posting that — it’s an important point.
Over the last while, I’ve commented on Japan’s near-zero immigration policy, in the face of rapidly aging and declining population.
I’ve opined that Japan will be in better shape than Europe and N. America in a few decades. For one — it will still be Japan, and still be populated by ethnic Japanese citizens. At best, the west will be a multiculti mess.
Japan is investing heavily in robot technology. If these robots don’t go all terminator on us, they will provide care services for the elderly, as well as carry out increasingly more industrial tasks. No need to bring in swarms of immigrants, to provide elder care to people they hate.
FWIW, the other reason I’m confident that Japan will adjust to a smaller population is that they are outsourcing a lot of production work to other countries. For instance, they don’t need millions of auto workers living in Japan — they have Americans, Europeans, Chinese, etc. to build the cars. Japan will continue to thrive as a “head-office” economy.
“Japan will continue to thrive as a head-office economy.”
Americans were sold the same lies; now our firms recruit management from Asia.
This is exactly why we will never be replaced by automatons, whose fatal flaws are.
Time will tell. For all its many strengths, the USA is also carrying a lot of baggage.
The worlds biggest lie—— Biggest lie of Free Traitors.
“we are so clever in the US that we’ll take care of the office and financial details while the rest of the world does the grunt work and slaves away for us” “They can have those dirty jobs that we won’t do anymore because they are beneath us!”
Plus the eco-wackos love seeing all our “polluting” factories closed and moving to China/Asia where they are out of sight and out of mind. Except for the CO2 they spew so now the eco-wackos have something new to obsess over with global warming.
No doubt; we’ve lost our exceptionalism. I guess we outsourced it...
Yes, American workers are now staring high unemployment and stagnant wages in the face due to these deals. It was bad enough when it ravaged the blue-collar workforce; now it is the turn of white-collar workers.
How much of this angst is driven by the government school system? They’ve decided to treat everyone the same, killing tech programs in the name of progress. It’s no wonder people are freaking out.
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