Friday, October 28, 2011

A Race Against the Machine for Jobs?

Are American workers in a race against the machine?

Begin quote from above news article:

Is technology worsening America's jobs crisis?

That's the argument of a new book, Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The authors contend that advances in technology have reduced the economy's ability to create new jobs for humans. And in the years to come, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, that impact is only likely to get stronger. Even when the economy eventually recovers from its current slump, they maintain, employment levels may not return to where they were even just a few years ago. end quote.

When I was about 18 my dream was then for each person to own their own surrogate robot that could go and work for them at their job so each person didn't have to work at a drudgery job every day. What I realized soon, however, was that this wasn't possible yet because there were not microprocessors yet because it was 1966. So, by 1970 I had sort of burned out in the computer field because there was no RAM yet and so being a computer programmer was really tedious then, much more than now. So, in 1978 I bought my first personal computer, a TRS-80 from Radio Shack for $600. I didn't buy another one until 1985 when I bought an IBM Clone AT when I drove up to Silicon Valley which included an Epson printer for $2500. I taught all my kids MS-DOS and later windows using that computer and before that I taught all the kids the BASIC language so that they could program their own games on the TRS-80. So by 1989 they were all computer literate on multiple fronts and have continued to be ever since and now the oldest is 40.

However, my dream of each person owning their own robot to work for them never happened. Instead, large companies now own all their own technology and humans en masse have been frozen out of their jobs and likely most of those jobs will never return for a variety of reasons worldwide. So, now what do we do with all the people that won't find jobs in this new era? Are they all supposed to live on the dole or starve?

So, How is the world going to cope with this new technological revolution where workers aren't needed as much. However, as long as people are alive they need to be taken care of or the "Occupy Wall STreet" movement will start to become more and more violent worldwide. 

If you understand what I'm saying, "The working man has lost the race against the machine". So now the only question is, "Will the common man survive having lost the race against the machine?"

No comments: