NightlyPoe said:
Computers had more than a big impact. They completely altered the workplace and made millions of jobs redundant. Heck, I was displaced myself when my first adult job as a filing clerk was bypassed by digital records. I don't know if you appreciate how much the jobs market has already changed over the years. Entire ways of life have contracted, disappeared, gone overseas, or been replaced by a computer program. Really, Trump won the presidency by appealing directly to the displaced (hence his victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan). You seem a bit fixated on driving jobs. Granted there's quite a few of them, even if the whole sector did get wiped out it wouldn't be as bad as the toll from the changes since the 70s. Actually, given that driving jobs are spread out fairly evenly by region, it probably wouldn't be nearly as destructive as it is when manufacturing, farming, textile, or mining industry downturns rip the economic heart out and only known way of life of entire regions. The issue is more when more when AI starts taking eating into vast chunks of the service economy and previously safe professional jobs that the paradigm will change. And that's a bit further off than the self-driving car. |
Done a bit of light research on my lunch break - this article is pretty interesting
A few notable points :
"For the most part, other than during the periods of intense debate in the 1930s and 60s, the consensus in the 20th century among both professional economists and the general public remained that technology does not cause long-term joblessness."
"Concern about technological unemployment grew in 2013 due in part to a number of studies predicting substantially increased technological unemployment in forthcoming decades and empirical evidence that, in certain sectors, employment is falling worldwide despite rising output, thus discounting globalization and offshoring as the only causes of increasing unemployment."
"While himself doubtful about technological unemployment, professor Mark MacCarthy stated in the fall of 2014 that it is now the "prevailing opinion" that the era of technological unemployment has arrived."
So it seems that the general consensus is that the rise of computers in the 90s did not have a net impact on jobs, whereas opinion is moving towards the rise of automation significantly reducing jobs going forward.
I admit not everyone is on the same page though - some economists believe that jobs lost will be replaced by new, yet unknown, types of jobs, created by technology - who knows whether this will actually pan out...
The difference between computers in the 90s and automation now, is that many computers were used to augment a human's efficiency/productivity, so actually gave much better bang for buck for employees as they were able to do more per hour, which in turn could actually be the difference between an employer deciding to take on a new person or not.
Automation isn't making us more efficient/productive at our jobs - they're doing them for us...
I guess I focus on trucks & taxis as they are very much of the moment in the automation space and one of the poster children for the current wave of AI.
There are 1.7 million truck driver jobs & about a million taxi/uber drivers, which I guess isn't a huge chunk of the 153 million total but they offer some of the best paying jobs for those without higher education and a lot of these people will be completely left adrift if they're supplanted... So it's not just the quantity of these positions but also their quality that's loss will be felt.
