In this article from the Economist, the author discusses a book called The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
This article brings up many questions and topics of the increase of technology. For example, as technology increases, will this drastically decrease the need for workers, thus increasing unemployment? In class today we discussed labor and capital and looked at an example of how a shock to an economy could decrease the amount of workers. From this reading, I can see how a major implementation of new technology can have a large impact on workers and jobs. However, I don't think that this would be something that would happen as a "shock" like a plague, but I do think that technology has and will continue to have a large role in unemployment.
In particular, I thought that these quotes were significant:
"People should develop skills that complement, rather than compete with computers, such as idea generation and complex communication. Policymakers should improve basic education, pour money into infrastructure and basic research, admit more skilled immigrants, and shift the burden of taxes from wages to consumption."
In order to stay employed, workers today need to find ways to compete with these new levels of high technology. With firms not needing to hire as many workers, this increases the productivity of the workers that they do have. However, workers need to develop skills that will allow them to be competitive and be able to survive.
New technology definitely has created a threat of machines taking over lower-skilled jobs. I agree with you when you say that workers need to develop skills in order to maintain jobs. This shows how the United States needs to continue trying to give an education to everyone because one cannot simply pick up a new piece of equipment and know how to use it. Along with technology increasing output, we need to make sure that it doesn't lower our labor force simply because people do not get the proper education to use new machines. The United States is growing with all of the innovations, so it is important that workers also get the necessary skills to use the equipment.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's interesting that you mention unemployment increasing. Most of the time, people hear about a new, "revolutionary" piece of equipment and think that it will do great for everyone, but in reality, it could actually make things harder for those who are unskilled workers. With technology increasing to the point where some unskilled jobs are not required, those workers will lose their job. It will be interesting to see what movements are made about such technologies, however this has happened in the past and people have adapted to it (an example from the past would be something like machines in factories putting pieces of something together instead of having to have a person put everything together). Like one of the quotes you put, policymakers will have to increase basic education as technology increases so people can operate these new machines. While technology may replace the lower skilled jobs, it will also create new jobs in a way. People will need to operate and manage the new machines, so basic education will need to be improved.