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Where does f you ask economists, they tend to have a different view total number of jobs in the economy because of these offsetting

FUTURE standards of low- and moderate-income workers. effects.
the
from the futurists and Silicon Valley types. Most of these
economists have devoted their careers to worrying about
Now, all this doesn’t mean that the new jobs will show up right
the labor market, particularly worrying about the living
away or that they’ll be located in the same place or pay the same
wage as the ones that were lost. All it means is that the overall
One of the reasons a lot of economists are skeptical about
need for human work hasn’t gone away. Technologists and
futurists don’t deny that’s been true historically, but they question
robots taking all the jobs is that we’ve heard it before. There was
of
WORK STAND a spike of automation anxiety in the late 20s and early 1930s whether history is a good guide of what’s to come.
when machines were starting to take over jobs on farms and
So, will this all change? Will today’s robots and AI cause mass
also in factories. In 1928, there used to be guards who opened
and closed the doors on New York subway trains, and people
unemployment? There’s reason to be skeptical, but nobody really
issued tickets before there were turnstiles.
knows. One thing we do know is that the wealth that technology
creates isn’t necessarily shared with workers.
So, while technology destroyed a lot of those jobs, we didn’t run
out of work. Even though it’s really easy for us to see jobs being One of the problems we've seen over the last 40 years is that we
replaced by machines, it’s a bit harder to visualize the jobs that have seen all of this rising productivity growth, but it hasn't been
A decade ago, robots still seemed pretty limited. come from what happens next. New technology creates jobs in broadly shared, it's been captured by a thin slice of people at the
top of the income distribution. Even if unemployment stays low,
a few ways. There are the direct jobs for people who design and
Now, not so much and this is all happening really maintain the technology, and sometimes whole new industries automation might worsen economic inequality.
fast. It’s causing some to forecast a future where are built on the technology.
humans can’t find work. This is predicted to be However, technology isn’t destiny. Governments decide how a
one of the biggest challenges we face in the The part we tend to forget is the indirect effect of society weathers disruption, and that worries people on both sides
labor-saving inventions. When companies can do
of the debate about the future of work. The world has adopted
coming decades. more with less, they can expand, maybe add new policies that instead of really trying to counteract the trend caused
products or open new locations, and they can by technology and globalization, we’ve in many cases exacerbated
lower prices to compete. This means that them. We’ve put a wind in the back of them and made them more
consumers can buy more of their product, or extreme and that’s a big problem. We will probably always be
if we don’t want any more of it, we can fascinated by the prospect of robots taking our jobs but if we focus
use the savings to buy other on things we can’t really control, we risk neglecting the things we
things. can.

This process is
how our standard of
living has improved
over time and it’s always
required workers. The key
economic logic here is automation does
indeed displace workers who are doing work that
got automated, but it doesn't affect the

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