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Fear of Robots Taking Jobs in the Short Term is Overblown, Says General Electric CEO (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "I think before we go to the phase where it's only robots at every bench, we are going to go through a phase of smarter workers," General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told reporters on March 30. GE has been investing heavily in futuristic manufacturing techniques. Immelt said that in Lafayette, Indiana -- where GE Aviation is ramping up production for portions of its new fuel-efficient LEAP aircraft engine -- "we're going to add workers, but probably not as many as we would have twenty years ago" and each worker will be "higher value, smarter, more productive." [...] So if phase one is smart workers, what's the next? "I'm not that smart," Immelt said. "I don't know exactly how many phases that we're going to go through. But I think we're going to be in phase 'smart worker' for a fair amount of time. I really do. I think we're better off as a country focusing on the smart-worker phase than going right to 'robots are evil.'"
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What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
To be fair, Jeff Immelt is simply speaking from one of the basic fallacies. He probably learned it at management school, and hasn't spent even a moment in critical thought about it.
Specifically, modern economics assumes infinite consumption which implies infinite need for work. "Infinite consumption" comes from either the Malthus'ian idea that human population will grow exponentially until resources run out, or the idea of "always wanting more", as in bigger house, more cars, more land, more toys, etc.
Personal consumption has limits, and industrialized nation population *doesn't* grow without bounds, and productivity keeps going up, and you start to realize that the job pool is finite, and any reduction in jobs puts stress on the people who need to find jobs to live.
The US is at about $50,000 per person in production, and that's a huge amount. Note that this is per person, and not per working person. We have enough wealth in this country to let everyone live comfortably with only half our workforce - and productivity keeps going up.
It's a fallacy of modern economics, it's unsustainable (labor versus shrinking job market) and something has to give eventually.
Whether we transition to a different system that lets people enjoy our production, or whether civilization crashes and burns, depends on people like Jeff Immelt.
Specifically, whether Jeff Immelt, and other like him, can unlearn modern economics and help transition us to a different model.