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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."
Back in 2007 the company I work for (manufacturing) was going to outsource my entire department to a company in Taiwan. The logic was that there was no way we overpaid ($100K+ per engineer), lazy (40-50 hrs/week) Americans could do what the industrious (60-70 hrs/week) and inexpensive ($24K/yr) Taiwanese could do. It was an obvious win-win for the company bean-counters.
However, when I was hired a few years before this, I began implementing a whole lot of automation into our stone-age processes. They were still keeping all production records in Excel spreadsheets and paper notebooks for fucks sake. Bar codes? RFID? What were those? I modernized the place, and after a few years of attrition we had fewer low-paid manufactuing drones working in the department, but we no longer needed them.
SO the bean counters did their cost audit and were shocked beyond belief that the American factory was producing goods WAY cheaper than they could get them produced in Taiwan. Taiwan came back with a cheaper offer, but it was STILL higher than our costs. The bean counters did another audit, because they knew there was NO WAY we could produce goods cheaper than Taiwan. Results: We sure can.
So, as a result of some (admittedly crude) automation, I and those who helped me with the automation, saved hundreds of jobs in the US from being offshored. And now my department is mosty highly trained (and well paid) engineers and technicians rather than mostly low paid people who move stuff from machine to machine. We still have the people who move stuff around, but they are fewer, more efficient and paid more than they were before. And the equipment is better maintained and more productive than ever.
So whenever some jackwit like this says automation is killing jobs, I get to trot out my personal example of automation SAVING jobs and creating new ones.
Self-driving cars will kill some jobs, but it will create plenty of new ones, many we haven't even thought of yet.