Technology and Jobs

I searched the forums for this topic, and altough I saw a few related threads, none of them were exactly what I was looking for. Basically, I wanted to get people's opinions or good links dealing with the impact that modern technology (including hardware, software, robotics, AI, etc) will have on the overall employment situation in developed countries in the not too far-off future.

When the Industrial Revolution happened several centuries ago, technological innovations changed the nature of employment from mostly rural farm related work to urban factory based work for many people. A group of people called the Luddites thought that these changes would be catastrophic due to humans being replaced by machines in the workplace, and fought against them. Although it can be debated whether the Industrial Revolution was good or bad for people, the Luddites appear to have been wrong, since the changes produced many new jobs after making many old ones no longer necessary. Overall, the employment picture did not dramatically change, although specific jobs did.

Centuries later, we are again in a somewhat similar situation, with the Information Revolution that is going on now and has been taking place for the past several decades. To anyone living in the modern world, it is very obvious that this new technology is replacing people in many areas of employment. I will list a few that I am familiar with (in US), but I am sure there are quite a few more. Toll booth operators being replaced with EZ-Pass scanners, supermarket cashiers replaced with automatic checkout computers, automated phone answering services replacing phone operators, online software replacing tax accountants, factory workers being replaced with robots, code generators replacing programmers, etc. Now, this is not meant to imply that all those professionals are replaced right away, just to note a trend.

So from this, it seems like information and related technology is definitely taking human jobs. So did the industrial technology, of course, so there is a sizable camp of people right now who are not worried by this phenomenon. Their perspective is that all new technologies take away some jobs but produce new ones to compensate. I agree with this, as information technology does produce new jobs, but for this to disprove fears of total job loss, two criteria have to be met, in my opinion. One, technology has to produce as many or more jobs as it destroys (otherwise there is an overall decrease), and the jobs have to be on the same or lower level of "complexity" as the ones destroyed (otherwise, even if there are jobs, they are too "complex" for workers who previously worked easier jobs, and overall unemployment increases anyway.

Personally, I do not believe that current technology meets those criteria. Jobs produces by it tend to be (on average) more "complex" than the jobs it destroys (software engineers, robotics experts, computer technicians, inspectors vs clerks, cashiers, phone operators), which violates the 2nd criteria. Many people that lose those jobs will simply be unable to work the new jobs. And, because the new jobs produced typically are paid more, for a company to justify paying for them, a lot more of lesser paid people have to be let go, to make it click financially, violating the 1st criteria. To look at it another way, one large company, with say several thousand employees, can produce these toll booth scanners/checkout machines/phone answering systems for large geographic regions since most of those machines are a one time deal, so a large number of clients would make the most financial sense. Therefore, a single large company employing the new technology produced jobs would put huge numbers of people out work that worked the old jobs for many other companies.

A common argument in economics that I've seen is that higher productivity (achieved via automation) leads to cheaper products, which leads to consumers having more money to spend, leading to more spending, leading to higher demand for more businesses, and thus to higher employment. But I see some problems with this as well. For one thing, if automation results in many people being laid off, regardless of how cheap products are, many people will lack money to buy them. Also, the increased demand in business activity has to be weighed against the layoffs being conducted to achieve it, as well as new businesses hiring fewer people due to their own automation.

I am not an economist nor a philosopher. This is simply something I think about whenever I see another machine or piece of software replace a person. Most of what I stated above is not the result of research, but simply my opinions. I've looked around the Internet for articles regarding this process, but unfortunately, all I've been able to find were one-sided statements of people's own opinions (technology will kill us all! -or- technology is our savior!), rather than an actual debate of the issue with both sides addressing each other. That's why I wanted to get your guys' opinions or possibly nice links about this.