Technology displacing workers

[tik 🪀✨]

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Source: http://m.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/luddites-may-be-vindicated-in-the-relentless-rise-of-the-machines-20130803-2r67i.html

Technology is steadily getting advanced enough that many jobs will become obsolete, especially low skilled work, without new alternatives. Given that large swathes of the population will not be able to find work, how do we support these people? Or, do you expect that there will always be enough work for everyone, despite technology?

For me, predictably, I believe the government will have to increase taxes on those capable of sacrifice to distribute to the.. shall we say in PC terms.. "differently useful" population. This will have to be done even just to keep the economy from standing completely due to lack of disposable income by consumers. Higher education will also need to be heavily subsidised.

Then again, there may be technology that allows anyone to learn anything nearly instantly, or any number of bizarre scenarios that could eliminate these problems.

What do you think?

[tik 🪀✨]

Assuming appropriate market mechanisms are allowed to work "properly," technology just changes the nature of jobs, and the relative pay scales between different kinds of jobs. So it is probably somewhat accurate to attribute some of the growing wealth inequality on technological innovation (heck back when most of the human species made about the same - just enough to keep barely alive and reproduce), but not the lack of jobs.

The problem as I see it, and I could just lack the imagination to fill in the gaps, is that technology would progress enough that there would be automatons that are intelligent enough to do just about any manual labour or service jobs (hell, even jobs that require creativity and other higher thinking). In such a situation, "appropriate market mechanisms" could utterly fail to make new kinds of jobs as the capabilities of many people would become completely worthless and disposable. Like I said, perhaps I just lack the imagination to foresee how we'd stay relevant. Humans are, after all, very adept at finding ways to make a buck or do something differently. Two hundred years ago I'm sure doom and gloom would have been being preached after a soothsayer gazed, seeing our present, in her crystal ball. Yet, here we are, and we're doing pretty alright.

To your second point - of course technology has a huge role in the lack of jobs at the moment. Just the internet has destroyed millions of jobs that used to be common as its influence rippled through society. It has created millions of jobs as well, obviously, but I don't think it evened out.

In some parts of the world even basic technological advances that are commonplace are shunned due to pressure from workers who don't want to lose their simple jobs. For example, companies have workers unload entire trucks by passing goods from one person to the next instead of simply buying a forklift. I'm not saying that Americans should do this, merely driving home that technological innovation has, is, and will play a huge role in unemployment. It's not at the root, of course. The root is always money. When it becomes cheaper to automate a process, technology displaces workers. But full employment could be acheived if many technologies disappeared overnight. Most people would be underemployed, sure, but employed nevertheless.

[tik 🪀✨]

http://m.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-nearly-half-of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/

Researchers have concluded that as many as 45% of current jobs are vulnerable to automation in the next two decades. Obviously that does not equate to 45% unemployment, but it does equate to an enormous burden on the creativity of society to sustain an economy where tens of millions of people have less disposable income. There is no plan from either side to combat this problem. Of course, it's impossible to accurate gauge the future. 45% seems particularly high, for starters. To combat or grow in such an environment, the article suggests outlawing automaton in some industries (for the former) and shifting our educational focus towards creative and highly social skills (for the latter).