It all began in the 18th century when James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny posed a threat to the jobs of cotton weavers’ jobs. Experts had fear and would periodically say that the more technology improved, the more unemployed the masses would be.
John Maynard Keynes’s in 1930 wrote that there would be mass unemployment within 100 years due to the emergence of newer technologies. The economizing of the use of labor has far outpaced the rate at which there have been more new uses of labor energy.
There has been a higher rate of production at a greater rate in the past ten years. This is due to the manufacture and transport of technical improvements.
It is predicted that 47 per cent of jobs in the US would disappear. The disappearance of tasks can be attributed to replacing manufacture with communication and transport with artificial intelligence.
There have been more than10.1 million new jobs since 2013. The rates of unemployment for the four biggest Western economies of the US, Britain, Japan and Germany are the lowest level in generations. The unemployment rate of New Zealand dropped to 3.9 per cent last month.
Australia has seen the fastest jobs growth last year since the early 2000s. Three hundred thirty thousand workers have lost their jobs involuntarily through redundancies or business closures. The rate has remained steady in the last five years, despite growing levels of automation in workplaces across the country.
It has been pointed out that average hours worked per person were 14 per cent higher compared to the early 1980s. The shares of workers in their job for more than ten years has increased from 20 per cent to 27 per cent.
Robot engineers put their machines against each other in a competition by the Pentagon. Simple tasks such as walking up steps, turning a valve and operating a power drill are examples. A human would take 10 minutes at most, and the winning robot took 45 minutes.
It is argued that the pace of innovation has stalled, as robots cannot work in employment sectors such as retail stores, restaurants, construction sites, hotels, commercial aircraft, hospitals or the offices. Robots are not adept at many of the routine tasks performed by humans, such as hopping off trucks and delivering packages.
Driverless cars and trucks would need to handle pets, weather, road hazards, accidents, and this seems beyond today’s technology.
Jobs are changing from inside, and it is estimated that 2000 tasks performed in 1000 jobs, it is found that new technology had replaced a 10th of functions in the average Australian position during the past five years.
Registered nurses spend 11 per cent less time recording patient medical history and more time looking after patients.
Jobs with tasks which had changed the most were the least likely to become obsolete. Indeed, the job market has been far more favorable to women than men in recent decades, generating productive part-time work and jobs that suit many women better.
A dramatic shift away from repetitive, simple jobs compared to those entailing more human interaction which had reduced the men’s satisfaction with their lives.
Economists are predicting an annual US wage growth, which picked up from 2.8-3.1 per cent between September and October. An increase of 2.3% is expected and can be better than June’s 2.1 per cent.
Similarly to the Luddites in the 18th century, who were more interested in destroying machinery they have emerged advocating a universal basic income. Penal taxation would be necessary as robots, and AI has rendered millions of jobs obsolete.
The share of employment has shriveled from almost 30 per cent to 10 per cent in the 1960s. Agriculture has dropped from 22 per cent to barely 2 per cent in the 1930s. The service sector has made up these losses in the past.
A century has passed since the essay was written by Keynes and history is going to have to change quickly and rapidly over a period for mass joblessness to become a reality.
Cynthia R Hopkins
4 years ago