9 years ago
2
Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data
In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars. The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?
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http://www.theguardian.com
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Up until now, technology allowed for mechanization of labor, not true automation. True automation began only in late 60's, early 70's with heavy industrial robots, but now cars can self-drive, burger joints have automated orders, even code optimizing and bug fixing is being automated. Today we finally reached the point where even knowledge intensive jobs can be given to machines, so the "Luddite fallacy" may stop being a fallacy after all.
Another problem is that you can't always retrain the workers in an industry into design. Of the thousands working at McDonald's, perhaps 50 would be able to learn to fix the machine that replaced them. Most of them are functionally literate, but not really capable of much more.