I keep coming back to this idea that as technology increases, we need less and less people to do work. That’s a good thing overall, but how to we deal with the sociological fallout from that? Take for example this new self-driving car that Google is working on. It’s not perfect yet, but they’ve driven hundreds of thousands of miles with it, and it’s likely that it’ll be commercially available pretty soon. But what happens when that occurs? Every single cab driver and truck driver in the country will be out of a job. Truck drivers can only go eight hours a day, a Google-truck can drive all night. Cabs can stay on the road 24/7 and will never get lost and there’s no worry that they won’t pick you up if you look shady. Plus you won’t have to tip. It’ll be cheaper and more efficient all around. Even if this system costs $20k, that’s less than you have to pay a truck driver for a year. Overall it’ll be a good thing to replace cabbies and truckers with computers (assuming for sake of argument that Google perfects their system). But my 15 seconds of internet research tells me that there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, and maybe another 1.5 million cabbies. That’s 5 million people who will lose their jobs when Google starts selling automatic cars. Maybe not all at once, but within a generation for sure. So what does society do with 5 million extra unemployed people? Maybe a few can be retrained to be computer programmers for Google or to install and maintain the systems, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Right now there’s about 11 million unemployed people in the US, and that’s a jobs crisis. Imagine adding another 5 million to that! And that’s just from this one new invention. There are plenty of other inventions out there that will reduce the number of employed even more across even more industries. Lawyers are increasingly losing out to software that does document review, doctors are getting replaced by diagnostic computers, etc. Remember when every business needed a typing pool filled with people to type documents? I don’t mean to come off as a Luddite. I’m pretty pro-technology, but I do think that we need to address the fact that as computers and robots and etc. get better we simply need less people to work. If we can’t figure out what to do with all of those excess people, the economy is going to get worse and worse. The GOP says that if you don’t have a job, it must be because you are lazy, but there’ll soon be 5 million drivers in this country that we’ll have to accommodate into other industries, which might not be possible no matter how industrious they are. You can’t just tell people to pound the pavement and get jobs, you have to have a new industry rise up that needs workers. So, what’s the solution?
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:17:35 +0000
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