The telltale sign that we are in a new age of automation isn’t in the latest food ordering apps, driverless taxis, or noodle-cooking robots. It’s in stagnant wages.
“We are not going to wake up tomorrow and see that robots have taken all the jobs,” said Ryan Avent, senior editor at The Economist. “We are going to see, instead, stresses on our wages, on our workers, and on our institutions. That’s what the great robot revolution looks like.”
Avent is the latest to weigh in on what has been dubbed the Digital Revolution, the Fourth Industrial Age, or the Second Machine Age, with his book “The Wealth of Humans,” published in September.
These theories sketch out various Utopian to near-apocalyptic futures, but share significant themes about the present: Our economic mores are out of date; rising inequality and deteriorating employment conditions across the developed world are significantly driven by technology; automation could lead to high permanent levels of unemployment.
Fears of a jobless future are not new. When the tractors rolled onto farms and the cotton mills first belched smoke, these fears surged, only to evaporate as industrialization wrought new jobs.
Could it really be different this time? After all, we don’t see plunging employment levels, and predominant classical economic theories don’t accept that tech progress can drag employment down.
Accepted economic wisdom has begun to be challenged by significant figures like former U.S. labor secretaries and the head of the World Economic Forum.
Automation and digital tech haven’t yet reduced the number of jobs, they say, but have been undermining the jobs market, hollowing out the middle class, and shunting more and more money into fewer and fewer hands.
It’s not simply people losing jobs to robots. If humanoid robots streamed down sidewalks every morning on their way to work, the changes would be easier to understand, says Avent. Instead we see new computer programs and apps, global supply chains, workplace reorganization, changing job roles, and, yes, more robots.
Worker Conditions
