The Truth About Automation, Jobs And Prosperity
Since the early days of the Industrial Age, there have been competing visions about the effects of technology. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster has been the model for technology gone awry while, ironically, Karl Marx’s vision of techno-utopianism has been adopted by avid capitalists and Silicon Valley libertarians.
At the heart of the debate lies automation. When we use machines to perform tasks formerly done by humans we unlock multiple effects. The most obvious, of course, is that somebody is out of a job, less obvious are how technology affects productivity and creates new industries, which we hope will create more and better jobs.
Yet there’s no guarantee that technology will raise all boats. Markets are complex ecosystems and things can’t always be broken down into simple, linear relationships. What we can do, however, is get a better understanding of how automation affects our society. Only then can we build a consensus about what we want outcomes to look like and work toward them.
How Automation Affects The Economy
In 1900, 30 million people in the United States worked on farms, but by 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a manner of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs…
