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Health & Fitness

Widescale Technological/Structural Unemployment Inevitable In Coming Decades

All your jobs belong to robots

A serious problem is threatening our modern society. This problem is not a typical one, such as war, corruption or famine. It's also not a new problem. But it is a growing problem, that can only get worse, and it could lead to the worsening of problems like war, corruption, and famine. It is different from most problems in that its source isn't a negative one. This is a problem that stems from innovation, affluence and ever-expanding technology.

Our world is driven by a Global Market Economy. Three types of people play an integral role in this system of economics: the employer, the employee, and the consumer. These three entities often play each others role. Together, the employer and the employee create a good or service that is than sold to the consumer. The consumer pays for the good or service with money from his or her respective employer, or gained by creating a good or service. Essentially, all three roles can be played by any given person at some point in life, often times simultaneously. By playing these interdependent roles, people drive the world we live in and enjoy today. Our cars, houses, clothes, food, and everything else we utilize in our day to day lives all required human labor to produce. The human beings that produced the things we enjoy were compensated for their time with money that could be used to buy products that please them.

Our current problem stems from the replacement of the employee by automated systems and machines. Know any elevator door men these days? How about automobile factory assembly line workers? These jobs have already been automated away, and nearly every other task a person can perform, a machine can now perform, or will be able to perform in the next 50 years. This is a global problem that is not just affecting the United States. The specter that threatens the jobs of everyone in our society isn't a foreigner eager to work for a lower wage, or government regulations, or evil corporations. It's a soulless metal beast willing to work for no wage at all, relentlessly, without a need for breaks, health insurance, or benefits. The biggest threat to our modern way of life is also what sustains and expands it.

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In the early days of our species, nearly everyone had to work merely to survive. What began as hunting and gathering by nomadic tribes would evolve into agriculture-based societies. As humans became more adept at manipulating the world around them, they would create tools that made life easier. The plow made it possible for one man and a beast of burden to do the work of many men in less time. Throughout recorded human history, our species has been searching for ways to liberate itself from labor. With less time spent working to avoid starvation, man was able to apply his mind to other tasks, and innovations spread from agriculture to manufacturing.

In the early 19th century, a man named Ned Ludd would strike back at the force that threatened his livelihood. Ned was a textile worker. The invention of the stocking frame made it possible for one person to do the work of many. The stocking frame was a knitting machine, and it put Ned out of a job. Ned needed his job to feed his family, and textiles were all he knew. So he gathered other textile workers displaced by this new machine, and they began to destroy the devices. It is this blind fury directed at the forces of innovation that would coin the term “Luddite” in reference to a person who rejects technological change or innovation.

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Ned and his band of technophobes would not be successful, and technology would continue its relentless march of progress. By the 20th century, humanity would see entire factories worth of human workers out of jobs, replaced by whirring and clicking mechanical assembly lines. The majority of human labor had shifted from agriculture, to industry, and now, to the service sector. In our modern world, information technologies rapid advance has led to machines that can "think." We have not yet realized full automated intelligence, but a machine has beaten humanities greatest chess masters, and more recently, Watson bested our two greatest Jeopardy! champions and the United States Congress. Now, the looming threat of automation casts its shadow on restaurant workers, construction workers, doctors and surgeons, accountants, teachers, and lawyers. It's not just repetitive manufacturing jobs that are going out the window... Nearly every job a person can perform can also be automated for lower cost and higher efficiency in the long run.

With people being replaced by machines, we are seeing a steady decline in purchasing power of many citizens. As people continue to pay more and more money into corporations providing products and services that are being produced by unpaid machines, we can observe a consolidation of capital in a small sector of our populace. The employee is soon to be a thing of the past, and without a way for the average person to make an income, the consumer will soon follow. Without consumer purchasing power, the employer will not be able to sell its product, and the very thing that has traditionally served to increase efficiency and production within the market system could facilitate its collapse.

Imagine a company that employs 100,000 people to make hamburgers. This company eventually buys machines for each of its outlets that make hamburgers automatically. This allows the company to fire 80,000 people. They can still make and sell the same amount of hamburgers, if not more. If they made ten million dollars when they had 100,000 employees, and had to divide it equally between all employees, everyone would get one hundred dollars. After cutting 80,000 employees from the pay roll, the remaining higher ups would make five hundred dollars. That’s a five-fold increase in profit for a small portion of a large company, and a total loss of income for everyone else.

The previously described hamburger company scenario is purely fictional, but we can see real world examples of exactly that situation happening in major companies the world over. Staples, Zappos.com, and many other companies now employ amazing robots to sort through warehouse inventory. The warehouse job I could have worked for $10 dollars an hour is not going to be available to my children. Mankind has reached the age of labor without human effort, but we are still operating with the same economic model from centuries ago. If we as a species and a society stay stuck in our old ways, even as technology continues to improve at an ever increasing rate, we will see vast portions of our society left behind as its wealth is pumped into the hands of a global elite. The middle class will become an underclass, and the billions of desperately impoverished people around the world will not be helped.

Thankfully, many people have begun to realize the nature of today’s problem, and think about solutions. 

Jacque Fresco envisions a Resource Based Economy, centrally planned by logic based computers, which distributes goods and services to everyone based on necessity and availability, with almost full automation. His vision would make money essentially obsolete, along with everything that revolves around the flow of capital... if everything we could need is produced automatically, and is as accessible as the air we breathe, how would one charge for it? Many people today view his system as too utopian, radical, and even marxist, and millions of others think that his Venus Project is a path to a brighter future.

Martin Ford wrote a book entitled The Lights in The Tunnel, in which he theorizes that the economy of tomorrow will be similar to our Market Economy today. The key difference is, the vast majority of people will not be paid to labor, as jobs will be automated. Rather, he believes governments will be forced to offer incentive based incomes, in which a person is payed to perform a civic duty, acquire education, or participate in a beneficial program. Many people dislike the idea of paying people for something other than work, but in order for a Market Based Economy to function, the consumer must have purchasing power.

We can never be certain what the future holds, but we can educate ourselves until we have a pretty good idea. Right now humanity is at a turning point. A lack of understanding of just how far technology has progressed, and just how far it will progress, could lead to massive social unrest, job displacement, and collapsing economies, as governments and corporations continue to scape goat each other and outside influences for the massive problems caused by wide scale unemployment. It seems in the political spectrum, the problem of structural/technological unemplolyment is being largely ignored. The administration claims they are creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but if a job doesn't produce a value competitive with that produced by mechanized private industry, it won't last. If people begin to realize just what is causing the important events in our daily life, technology could be societies hope, rather than its undoing.

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