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It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs (nytimes.com)
The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change, argues Louis Hyman, director of the Institute for Workplace Studies at the ILR School at Cornell. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes. From a report: This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers. Consider the Industrial Revolution. Well before it took place, in the 19th century, another revolution in work occurred in the 18th century, which historians call the "industrious revolution." Before this revolution, people worked where they lived, perhaps at a farm or a shop. The manufacturing of textiles, for example, relied on networks of independent farmers who spun fibers and wove cloth. They worked on their own; they were not employees.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
It's been happening for centuries:
A programmable punch card loom replaced the need to have a group of four or more artisans spending weeks making one garment, and where no two were perfectly identical. The punch card operator just needed to make sure that the thread reels never ran out and even that was automated. That led to the Luddites. One that battle was over, looms could be powered by waterwheel power, then steam engines, then by electricity. Punched cards were replaced by electronics and then digital media. It only takes one Photoshop artist and a technician to operate 15 digital looms.
Automated traffic lights replaced the need for traffic police. Automated elevators replaced the need for elevator operators. Automated telephone exchanges replaced the need for telephone operators.
We had the Wapping dispute where print workers refused to modernize. They had left it so late to catch up, that by the time the management wanted to introduce new technology, those print shops consisting of copper drums, boilerplate and teams of men adding and removing metal print would be replaced by a commercial laser printer running PostScript and no-one was needed to convert journalist shorthand into metalwork. Their jobs had been vapourized overnight. This was before the internet so they couldn't retrain as web page designers.
In the 1990's, there was the goal of the "paperless office". By using high resolution large screens, there was less need to print documents out. The other advantage was that they could flatten management structures by going from a 1:3 ratio of directors:managers:supervisors:engineers down to a 1:10 ratio. Those managers either took retirement or moved into the financial industry.
The next phase is that engineers want to focus on one particular skill or set of skills, while project managers like to push engineers "outside their comfort zone" so that no one person is irreplaceable. That just leads to engineers choosing to be freelancers and contractors so that their duties are tied down in writing and they don't get nudged out of the way as new employees arrive.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. The reason people don't want to hire people to do the work is because Technology is overall cheaper.
While it makes good business sense to do so, if those now unemployed workers can't find a job because other people aren't hiring people, then eventually there will be few people left to buy goods and services. Peak capitalism looks horrible.
It really is that simple. Just solve more problems than you create, and you will never have trouble getting or keeping a job. Technological innovation, government policies, cultural conventions, and the opinions of the director of workplace studies at Cornell have nothing to do with it.
There are two ways of making this formula work. You can minimize the term on the right, or you can maximize the term on the left. Let's consider both cases.
The principal problem you will create as an employee (or business owner) is that you will expect to be paid. Your employer/customer does not want to do this. It will be a problem for them. This is an unavoidable problem. There are other factors on the right-hand side that are avoidable, however. You can minimize the problems you create by being a nice person. Don't be a prima donna or a jerk. There is an entire self-help industry devoted with minimizing the right-hand side of the formula, so I'll say no more about it here.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side. So the best approach for getting and keeping a job is to maximize the number of problems you solve. Note that the better of a problem solver you become, the more income you can command without unbalancing the formula. So if you want to achieve "employment security", probably your best approach is just to learn to be a better problem solver.
So how do you learn to solve problems? Practice solving problems!
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed. My theory is this has not so much to do with the subject matter of STEM as it does with the way STEM is taught. In your STEM classes, the homework and the tests and most of what you do is solve problems. You get lots and lots of practice solving problems. And that ends up making the students better problem solvers. Courses in which you write long papers tracing the development of gender stereotypes in 17th century New England farming communities do not provide nearly as much practice at problem solving, which results in graduates who are not as good at solving problems, and who therefore have more difficulty making the aforementioned formula work.
The problems you solve need not be technical problems. Problem solving tends to be an easily transferable skill. You might develop problem solving skills in math class, or playing chess, or working puzzles, but then end up applying your problem-solving prowess to management or administrative or marketing problems.
The key is to practice solving problems. Practice constantly. Make it your lifestyle to solve problems. Make problem solving part of who you are. Do you see some litter on the ground? Pick it up and you have solved a problem. Are there dirty dishes in the sink? Wash them and put them away - another problem solved. Do you see a shopping cart that some prior patron has left in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store? Push that cart to the cart corral, or back into the store. (Do not be tempted to say "that is somebody else's problem". Your goal should be to solve problems, not assign blame for them.)
If you dare: end each day be reviewing what you have done and detailing the problems you have created and the problems you have solved, and resolve to do better the next day. If you are very brave, you can ask your spouse/significant-other to help you with that task, as they will often be able to point out countless problems that you created or problem-solving opportunities that you omitted because
There is a old Bible verse about feeding 5,000 people. It starts with one basket containing a few loaves of bread and fish.
As a people we produce more everday than we need. We have more than enough for everybody, but our economic system does not value human life intrinsically.
Thus we value the individual's ability to increase production capacity and wealth stores. Not all are equally suited to such advanced thinking and foresight. In a purely evolutionary system these once strong laborers, the former backbones of our economy, the shoulders upon which we have stood, would die off due to not being able to acquire and manage the resources to compete in an ever increasingly intellectually challenging economic game.
But there are those which ask the moral and ethical questions of "what am I working for?"... Are we merely working to i crease the wealth of a "noble few", while hoping to skim enough resources off the top to survive? Or are we working for some greater purpose? Are we working to ensure that all of humanity is free to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Indeed I just looked up the key paper defining this concept (in English) which is De Vries, J. (1994). "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution. The Journal of Economic History", 54(02), 249–270 (doi:10.1017/s0022050700014467, you can get it with Sci-hub).
There is nothing in this paper about workers being herded into workshops. Instead the claimed "industrious revolution" is asserted to be increased intensity of work in the home for market (as I described above) to purchase goods from outside. Here is a key statement of this from the paper (p. 262):
A shift from relative self-sufficiency toward market-oriented production by all or most household members necessarily involves a reduction of typically female-supplied home-produced goods and their replacement by commercially produced goods. At the same time, the wife was likely to become an autonomous earner.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The kinds of social decisions we can make, that is to say, the kind that are practical, are determined by the technology available.
You can't choose to have a city, and to have zero slave labor, if you tech level is only what the Romans had. The choice to abolish slavery was made only after the tech level made people productive enough that the city could function on the effort of paid laborers who are free to choose their own jobs.
And so on.
Actually, the Romans had access to a whole bunch of technology that could have replaced a lot of the slave labour but chose not to use it. They 1) thought it would be a bother to have a lot of jobless slaves and 2) figured slaves were cheaper in most cases. In other cases, they just didn't see the technology as something that could be useful for work and production, since they had slaves for that and didn't think there was any need to tinker with that.
Just like today, there are a lot of things you could easily automate (the technology exists), but it's still cheaper to have people do the work...especially if you can outsource the labour to a cheap and poor country. You can see today when you go from a country where labour is cheap to a country where labour is expensive, that in the latter, there is a lot more automation.
As for whether slavery was necessary in Roman society to build its cities...well, ancient China also had large cities, was technologically similar to Rome, but was much less reliant on slaves. Slaves existed yes, but were usually a much smaller portion of the population than in the Roman Empire and many emperors actively tried to ban slavery or reduce it.