Jon Evans Quotes
As hardware doubles its density every 18-24 months, courtesy of Moore's Law, and as software eats the world, technology will replace a broad swathe of jobs outright - from burger-flippers to diagnosticians - and atomize many others from full-time positions into gigs performed by many fungible workers. Tech, in short, will eat jobs.
Evans, Jon. "Tech Will Eat Jobs." TechCrunch, Yahoo, 2014.
Technology has always displaced and replaced workers, but most industrial technological breakthroughs, in the long run, have created new jobs and better paid ones. What worried Gompers did not appear to materialize in his lifetime, but actually became and issue on the later years of the 20th century and the early 21st century where the computer the robot, and the sophisticated software began to replace workers at a faster rate than new opportunities were created. Gompers was one of the harbingers of things to come.
In the Great Recession, the industrial production had improved much by 2012—the 4th year of the Obama administration. However, technology and automation were displacing workers. At the time, the U. S. was producing the same amount as before the Great Recession only it was being done with 5 million fewer workers.
The Grammar Curmudgeon
We think of jobs being eliminated when technology is employed as a modern problem. But here, in 1936, automation was eliminating jobs rapidly. One fascinating difference is that Mrs. Roosevelt observes that the laborers jobs are eliminated and the high school and college graduates can run the enterprise. 75 years after this quotation, the jobs of the high school graduates were being eliminated and some higher education was necessary for most jobs. As technology improves, the workers who are necessary require more and more education.
His 50 year prediction was a little too optimistic although a large percentage of the routine, and some non-routine, jobs had become automated especially in the automobile and other manufacturing arenas, and many other fields. But there were still some other jobs that were still being done without machines in 2014. Asimov was essentially right but a little early in his timing.
One problem critics have with his argument is that while there is always work to be done, there are not always entities willing to pay for the additional work. Gains in productivity will justify investment in more rapid deployment of technology; thus entities in society are will to invest the funds. But if there is no visible economic return from the additional work, corporations and taxpayers may be unwilling to fund it leading to massive unemployment and instability.
Computers, robots have replaced many more American workers than those who lost their jobs by having them replaced by foreign labor. Ironically, even in counties like China, South Korea, and a number of others, have "liost" millions of jobs to automation thenselves.
The government of the United States, even as late as the 2nd decade of the 21st century, still had not solved this problem.
Jon Evans is a Canadian novelist, journalist, adventure traveler, and software engineer.
