Technologies Like Google's Self-Driving Car: Destroying Jobs?

Nerval's Lobster writes "For quite some time, some economists and social scientists have argued that advances in robotics and computer technology are systematically wrecking the job prospects of human beings. Back in June, for example, an MIT Technology Review article detailed Erik Brynjolfsson (a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management) and a co-author suggesting that the evolution of computer technology was "largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years." Of course, technological change and its impact on the workforce is nothing new; just look at the Industrial Revolution, when labor-saving devices put many a hard-working homo sapien out of economic commission. But how far can things go? There are even arguments that the technology behind Google's Self-Driving Car, which allows machines to rapidly adapt to situations, could put whole new subsets of people out of jobs."

Comments

Out of jobs?

[nospam007]

I don't employ any people in my car so you must mean the chauffeurs in the yellow cars who speak only Pashto or Urdu?

Re:Out of jobs?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Cars don't destroy Jobs.

Cook destroys Jobs.

Re:Out of jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought cancer destroyed Jobs. Too soon?

Re:Out of jobs?

[alexander_686]

No

Jobs created Cars.

Jobs created Pixar which created Cars, using the transitive property.

Re: Out of jobs?

[Obfuscant]

I can remember when we rode a primordial ooze to work, ten miles, uphill, both ways, in the winter. And that was luxury.

Now, get off my algal pond you young whippersnapper.

Re:Where were you uncaring monsters

[MickyTheIdiot]

Buggy whip manufacturers just started making OTHER type of whips..

er... so I'm told.

Job security

[gumpish]

One nice thing about being a programmer is that if computers ever take over your job then the Singularity has arrived.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, man, Wells explained this almost a century ago. The general busy-working masses that don't have the brainpower to be a "high-end engineer or tech person" live in a leisure garden paradise and do nothing, while the engineers and tech people live underground, keep the general machinery of the world ticking, and occasionally kill and eat one of the those surface-dwelling Eloi for sustenance. Simple!

Re:short term yes, long term no..

[Ralph Wiggam]

Yes. This 15 year trend is definitely caused by something that goes into effect next year.

Not for me...

[Missing.Matter]

I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.

That's been true of every advance in technology

[HangingChad]

The internet put people out of jobs in the newspaper and magazine industry, it also opened up a world of new ways for people to make money.

Self-driving cars will have a lot less impact than the internet. A handful of cab drivers, whoopee do.

It's going to be awesome seeing self-driving cars assign red light camera companies to the scrap heap of history...parasitic bastards.

I sure hope so.

[TheSpoom]

Read Manna by Marshall Brain. It's an interesting view of two potential post-labor robot-driven economies. I hope we end up in the robot-driven paradise instead of the everyone-on-welfare dystopia, but I'm not convinced we will. I'm crossing my fingers for a Star Trek economy in my lifetime.

(Of course, given that we're looking perhaps a bit beyond 30 years in the future, it'll probably look very similar to today in a lot of ways with some changes that nobody predicted.)