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If This Era of Automation Mirrors the Past, We're in Trouble.
There are two general philosophical camps when considering the automated future: those who believe it will be a time where massive numbers of jobs eliminated and large segments of the population will find themselves struggling to make ends meet, and you will also find people who think everything is going to be just fine. The second group will argue that automation will create new types of work and that automation has always been a positive thing in the past.
Those who think automation fears are overhyped often cite the Industrial Revolution, which started towards the end of the 18th century, as a time when there were major changes in the labor market that ended up being positive overall. “Most modern economies have experienced robust wage and employment growth since the Industrial Revolution,” economists wrote for the World Economic Forum earlier this year. “As automation has displaced workers in performing certain tasks, other technologies have emerged to restore labor’s central role in the production process by creating new tasks in which humans have a comparative advantage.”
There is no doubt the Industrial Revolution improved the nature of work, increased how much we were able to produce and helped us progress in other ways. What arguments like this miss is how long it took for most of us to start feeling these positive effects.
“In the case of the Industrial Revolution, people’s lives didn’t improve for seven decades,” Frey says. “That’s two generations. I think we need to be very concerned about some of these short-term effects on people.”
Frey says for seven decades wages were stagnant, food consumption decreased and “people’s living standards deteriorated.” The economy was doing quite well, but most of the workers weren’t seeing the benefits of that economy.
...
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/if-this-era-of-automation-mirrors-the-past-were-in-trouble
Those who think automation fears are overhyped often cite the Industrial Revolution, which started towards the end of the 18th century, as a time when there were major changes in the labor market that ended up being positive overall. “Most modern economies have experienced robust wage and employment growth since the Industrial Revolution,” economists wrote for the World Economic Forum earlier this year. “As automation has displaced workers in performing certain tasks, other technologies have emerged to restore labor’s central role in the production process by creating new tasks in which humans have a comparative advantage.”
There is no doubt the Industrial Revolution improved the nature of work, increased how much we were able to produce and helped us progress in other ways. What arguments like this miss is how long it took for most of us to start feeling these positive effects.
“In the case of the Industrial Revolution, people’s lives didn’t improve for seven decades,” Frey says. “That’s two generations. I think we need to be very concerned about some of these short-term effects on people.”
Frey says for seven decades wages were stagnant, food consumption decreased and “people’s living standards deteriorated.” The economy was doing quite well, but most of the workers weren’t seeing the benefits of that economy.
...
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/if-this-era-of-automation-mirrors-the-past-were-in-trouble
YEP!
5 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The problem isn't industrialization (or automation) per se, the problem is the social/economic relations inherent to capitalism. And it's capitalism that is consuming resources and generating waste at an unsustainable pace.
