I thought that this article was very interesting because the technology is increasing in the world but I never thought it would end up taking our jobs. With technology increasing it will be interesting to see if and how many years it takes till robots take over all the jobs. another thing that I am interested in is when robots do take over the majority of the jobs how will the economy respond to this due to a increase in unemployment because robots are doing all the work. the one thing that is interesting is everyone wants to have bigger and better technology but what this is doing is making the need for human labor to decrease. it will be interesting to see how long it takes until technology runs the majority of the market.
link: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/29/evidence-that-robots-are-winning-the-race-for-american-jobs.html
6 comments:
I think the concern for large amounts of unemployment would be much larger if the United States wasn't an open economy. As companies begin to work with robots and become more capital intensive rather than labor intensive jobs that need workers will be in other countries and the workers within the US will emigrate to the nations that have labor based jobs. While the United States focuses on service and robot based jobs. I think it is likely that we will see unemployment for labor workers but there are not the large amounts of labor workers in the US as there used to be- in fact there is almost a shortage in some industries. As robots take over jobs some people will be unemployed but they do have the ability to move to markets in other countries that want to use their labor skills.
The increase in technology, particularly in manufacturing, is a multifaceted issue. The increase on unemployment due to robots is certainly negative for those workers and families impacted. However, I do not think that putting any kind of stop to technological innovation is beneficial. I would be very interested to see more data on the actual cost of the unemployment due to robots; I imagine it to be more efficient for the national economy overall to employ robots rather than people. I do wish the United States offered more comprehensive active labor market policies, similar to what we have been studying about Sweden. I think an interesting aspect of this article is the idea that "Robots affected both men's and women's jobs, the researchers found, but the effect on male employment was up to twice as big. The data doesn't explain why, but Mr. Acemoglu had a guess: Women are more willing than men to take a pay cut to work in a lower-status field." The article did not elaborate but I am curious as to the role of gender in the robot unemployment debate.
I agree with both Rachel and Elise. Because free-market capitalism moves relentlessly toward innovation and efficiency, this is a phenomenon that will be repeated in small steps and big leaps in every industrialized society. Driverless vehicles for example, all the underemployed workers who have found a slot driving for Uber and Lyft may soon find themselves redundant. And not just them. Driverless long-haul trucks are rolling into view, too. A recent White House study projects that as many as 3.1 million drivers of all kinds; cabbies, truckers, chauffeurs, bus drivers could be made obsolete by the technological revolution in just a few years. It'll be interesting to see how the government will manage the unemployment rate when the robots eventually set up shop for the long haul.
I think that it might be worrying in the short run that there would be a shortage of jobs and unemployment would be present, however, with technology advancing there is growth in the economy. With robots being present and more technological advances, humans will still be required to manage, create and maintain these "robots". The job market will then cater to more technical fields such as different kinds of engineering and skills which help us use this technological software and hardware.
In the coming years, it seems inevitable that many jobs will continue to become automated with the question thus being how effectively people in the affected job sectors can be retrained. Additionally, it will be interesting to see how institutions of higher education gear their courses to cultivating a workforce that can thrive in this new environment. Ultimately, the pace and nature of this change is one of the central issues of today and, accordingly, any politician running for elected office at either the state or national level should have a detailed and clearly-articulated strategy for dealing with this fact.
This is an example of how rapidly our economy and world is changing. Blue collar workers are being left behind and their frustration came to a head in the 2016 presidential election. This is where the Swedish model of active labor market policy would be beneficial so that we could retrain those being replaced by these robots.
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