Understanding the impact of robots on employment — A Prequel

By Siddharth Singh, 16th June, 2015

Among other disruptions, this blog intends to look at conversations surrounding the increasing automation of the global economy — and its impact on the employment of human labour. (There have already been three posts on this issue: 1, 2 and 3).

However, this concern is hardly a new one. From a similarly themed series of articles on MIT Technology Review,

Worries that rapidly advancing technologies will destroy jobs date back at least to the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution in England. In 1821, a few years after the Luddite protests, the British economist David Ricardo fretted about the “substitution of machinery for human labour.” And in 1930, during the height of the worldwide depression, John Maynard Keynes famously warned about “technological unemployment” caused by “our discovery of means of economising the use of labour.” (Keynes, however, quickly added that “this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment.”)

Are we then unnecessarily concerned about temporary “maladjustments”? Perhaps, although evidence points to such disruptions occurring at a far faster speed than ever before, and with potentially a more wide ranging impact — than the kind that occurred in the Industrial Revolution. For more on this, do read Part 1, 2 and 3 of this series.

The MIT Technolgy Review article adds,

These are long-term trends that began decades ago, says David Autor, an MIT economist who has studied “job polarization” — the disappearance of middle-skill jobs even as demand increases for low-paying manual work on the one hand and highly skilled work on the other. This “hollowing out” of ­the middle of the workforce, he says, “has been going on for a while.” (…) the recession of 2007–2009 may have sped up the destruction of many relatively well-paid jobs requiring repetitive tasks that can be automated. These so-called routine jobs “fell off a cliff in the recession,” says Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, “and there’s been no large rebound.”

Concerning? Read the full article for a longer discussion on such a possible “jobless future”.

Siddharth can be followed on Twitter @siddharth3