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The Daily Signal
Could You Soon
Lose Your Job to a Robot?
James Sherk
August 03, 2014
Photo: Creative Commons
As senior policy analyst in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation,
James Sherk researches ways to promote competition and mobility in the
workforce rather than erect barriers that prevent workers from getting
ahead. Read his research.
Is the increasing automation of our economy a threat to American wages
and jobs? Should the American worker fear the rise of the robots? No,
not really.
Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes warned that society faced “a new
disease” of “technological unemployment” in which the “means of
economizing the use of labor [were] outrunning the pace at which we can
find new uses for labor.” Much more recently, Michael Strain of the
American Enterprise Institute wrote about how “robot workers could tear
America’s social fabric.” Strain worries that machines could eliminate
the livelihoods of millions of less-skilled workers.
These fears are misplaced. In reality, technological advances will
improve living standards and working conditions for the vast majority
of Americans.
Computers have certainly automated many tasks. From travel to banking
to manufacturing to retail, machines now perform formerly human tasks
quickly and reliably. Technology has eliminated countless jobs in the
U.S. and around the world. Even Foxconn, famous for its vast
iPhone-assembly lines in Taiwan, plans to install a million robots.
But almost as quickly as technology has eliminated some jobs, it has
created new ones. Like developing smartphone apps. Or shuttling Uber
passengers. Or moving inventory in Amazon warehouses. Contrary to
Keynes’s prediction of 15-hour workweeks, the economy has always found
new uses for displaced workers.
Why? Human wants have proved insatiable. Most Americans could work 15
hours a week and make as much as the average Joe in the 1930s did. But
few Americans today would accept that standard of living — in a much
smaller dwelling with no TV, no air conditioning, and certainly no
smartphone. All these “extras” require workers to produce them.
Indeed, automation drives growth in living standards. In order for the
average American to consume more, the average worker must produce more.
Automation enables businesses to make more goods with less labor, which
means more output and higher living standards.
A construction worker who can operate a backhoe will make much more
than one using only a shovel. An economy with backhoes will also be
able to build a lot more.
In a world with more automation, not only will work still exist, it’ll
be safer. Computers have automated many of the more-demanding
manual-labor jobs in the economy, and workplace injuries and deaths
have fallen steadily as machines took over these more physically
dangerous tasks. Labor-saving technology benefits society.
Of course some people will wind up worse off than before. Some whose
jobs get automated will have difficulty finding work that pays as much.
And higher demand for non-routine skills will put less-skilled workers
at a relative disadvantage. But the vast majority of workers will
almost certainly come out ahead.
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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