How Technology Is Destroying Jobs Essays Example

The article talks about how technology, namely automation, is replacing people. If you visit a car factory you will see robot arms welding doors onto cars, and not people, although people may be sitting in the control booth above the floor waiting to intervene if something goes wrong. While the article is not suggesting that people go and smash all the computers and resist the rise of the machines, it does suggest that there has been a widening gap between productivity and employment. In other words, starting in 2000, according to data from the United States Labor statistics, productivity levels have increased robustly while employment has stagnated. In the last two years, companies, especially in the service industry purchased 320,000 robots. That means people are making less money while more and more automated robots are shipping our Amazon Prime orders and building our cars. Economists worry that the machines won’t completely take over in a robot apocalypse, but it does show that automation is hurting the American Middle class worker. Jobs that would have been easy to get, for example, working in a car factory, or working in the service industry, just are not there as they were in the 1940s and 1950s. But is it just automation that is causing the problem? It could just be a bad economy and may have nothing to do with robots on the factory floor. But it does show that when the economy is hurting, individuals are hurting more than ever. New technologies create new skills that the average blue collar worker may not possess. People who invent a software to do your tax might earn millions of dollars, but not everyone is a technology superstar. The problems economists and everyone are worried about is not that the technology makes our lives better by making everyday tasks easier to do, but the “dirty secret” is that economically not everyone benefits.