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Technology has had a tremendous impact on our jobs. We have since the dawn of time been losing our jobs to technology as it advances and becomes more complex and capable of many things. Theeconomist.com mentions this in their article Coming to an Office Near You, "INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.”(the economist.com)
It has however created new jobs, after all without computers there wouldn't be software and hardware engineers and without electricity we wouldn't have electricians; but it seems to have more of a negative impact than a positive one on society as factory production workers, people in customer service and many others lose their jobs to machines and robots. “ Amazing as always, gave her a week to finish a big assignment and came through way ahead of time. ”
Jeremy Rifkin talks about this too in his book titled The End of Work, "Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world. That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves without jobs, many victims of a technology revolution that is fast replacing human beings with machines in virtually every sector and industry of the global economy."(Rifkin, Introduction, pg. XV)
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According to The Los Angele Times in just ten years time robots will overtake tons of our jobs and save companies money in the long run by ousting human labor, "cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing manufacturing labor costs down 16%, a report Tuesday said. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that investment in industrial robots will grow 10% a year in the world's 25-biggest export nations through 2025, up from 2% to 3% a year now. The investment will pay off in lower costs and increased efficiency." (The LA Times)
Not only does technology reduce the number of jobs we have for people, it also dumbs down the existing ones quite a bit; for example we discussed in class how working in a steel mill used to be hard and extraneous labor but now that we have machines doing the labor for us the job is just making sure everything runs smoothly and nothing breaks, most of the labor part of the job has been removed.
Technology really took a huge toll on the job market and society in general during the industrial era, “Technology became the new secular God, and American society soon came to refashion its own sense of self in the image of its powerful new tools.” (Rifkin pg. 44) It all started because people wanted to be more efficient and produce more, "All of the technological utopians shared an obsession with the creative and redeeming power of efficiency, a once obscure English time value cloaked in religious significance that metamorphosed into a powerful new secular time value in the new machine culture.
More efficient machines and more efficient use of time, they believed, would lead to a workerless future vast of material abundance and unlimited free time." (Rifkin pg. 49) Unfortunately this drive for efficiency didn't result in the way they thought it would; it actually led to the great depression as many people lost their jobs to these new machines and were out of work. A plethera of new machines were invented during this time, softschools.com lists many; for example the Spinning Jenny was invented which could spin several balls of yarn at one time which helped to make fabrics much quicker than doing it by hand. Another one that they talked about was the cotton gin which separated the seeds from cotton much faster than humans and helped cotton farmers to make more money; the sewing machine was also invented during this time which allowed us to make clothes much faster than sewing them by hand. As the number of man hours needed to produce products went down because of the new machines and technologies that were being used to make things so did the number of jobs and many people were left with no work and no way to support themselves; history.com discusses these terrible effects in their article titled The Great
Deperssion, "consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed" (history.com). Our constant need for efficiency and speed really caused the economy and society as a whole to take a big hit and really changed society, "Efficiency came to dominate the workplace and the life of modern society, in large part, because of its adaptability to both the machine and human culture.
There was a time value designed to measure the input/output ratio of energy and speeds in machines that could easily be applied to the work of human beings and the workings of all of society. Within its grasp, every force and activity became instrumental to utilitarian and productive goals. From now on, human beings and machines would be measured and assigned worth based on their relative efficiencies." (Rifkin pg. 50) As you can see societies need to produce more with less energy not only played a big part in the downfall of the economy which led to the great depression but it also completely changed society forever and now humans are valued more on their efficiency and how fast they can do things rather than their actual worth as a human being and a part of society.
During the post-industrial era the job market and society continued to morph and change as it evolved. We now have many new jobs that came along with all of our new technology we created like blue collar jobs however as we get further and further into the post-industrial age and technology progresses blue collar work will likely soon go extinct as human workers get replaced with machines and computers,
"Intelligent machines equipped with rudimentary speech recognition already exist. Companies like BBN Systems and Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, have developed computers with vocabularies of up to 30,000 words. Some of the new thinking machines can recognize causal speech, carry on meaningful conversations, and even solicit additional information upon which to make decisions, provide recommendations and answer questions."(Rifkin pg. 61)
This era has also had a huge impact on many different production industries like the steel industry and mining; now that we have robots and machines that can mass produce we can produce much more steel and mine more safely and much deeper into the earth than humans can top produce more coal with less workplace hazards. The farming industry has also changed massively; theguardian.com discusses the fact that we now can farm indoors and mass produce food, "Now in a 90,000 square-foot facility in Chicago's Bedford Park, the largest indoor farm in North America uses aquaponics to produce organic herbs and leafy greens, distributed to grocery stores and restaurants in the Chicago area. And they're looking to grow even bigger. “It's been a number of hobbyists who have scraped together a few thousand [dollars] to make an indoor farm and have tried to make it a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger," says Matros.
"But there's no one really professionalizing it or automating it, or fully putting capitol towards making big farms to feed lots of people. And I think the industry is about to tip." He hopes to do so by becoming the local farm for every community in the country. Matros is planning to open about 20 new facilities across the US that serve consumers within a 200-mile radius. “Each farm is fully modular. I joke that each farm is like a Lego block and you just need to drop it wherever you want to put a farm," Matros says. "We have these Lego boxes and we know how they work and we just have to put them together and drop them." (theguardian.com)
The post industrial age and the beginning of the information era has totally changed the way we can communicate with each other too with the invention of cellphones and the internet, we can now talk to someone at the push of a button. With the post-industrial age has also come globalization and the outsourcing of jobs. The globalization part of it isn't necessarily bad because it helps us to connect with others around the world and form relationships with people and societies in other countries than our own. Outsourcing jobs however has not been the best thing for our economy, Remington Rhett from Linkedin.com duscusses this in his article called Outsourcing: The Negative Effects, "The practice of outsourcing has greatly affected employment aspects in the United States. American companies have hired people from foreign countries that are highly skilled, but were willing to accept lower salaries, resulting in hundreds of thousands of American people being without a job, in particular the semi-skilled and skilled workers. The effects of outsourcing has made it even more difficult for American people who are at or below the poverty line that willing to do minimally skilled jobs, to find employment. Outsourcing can lead to levels of poverty that hasn't been experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930's, resulting in reduction of consumer spending and tax revenues" (Rhett).
He is completely right, outsourcing could and probably will in time have a terribly negative effect on our economy and job market that could possibly help lead to another recession or even a full blown depression. The service industry has changed a lot with the post-industrial age and the intro of the information age, now we have self checkout lanes in stores which makes cashiers unnecessary. I went to Red Robin not too long ago and now you can pay for your food on a tablet at your table instead of waiting for the waiter or waitress to bring you a check and ring you up. In some restaurants you can order your food the same way so you don't have to wait for anyone to take your order, technology is slowly replacing many service jobs along with blue collar and production jobs as I mentioned before.
Now the big question is, is this future viable? I think it will be. You certainly can replace lots of employees with machines and robots but there will always be value behind real human interaction and hand crafted goods made by real people. I personally don't think the service industry will ever be fully replaced by robots, many people don't want a machine taking their order or telling them what's good on the menu, we crave human interaction.
There will always be value behind a hand crafted guitar or vase, I think there will at least be some sort of work in that industry in the future. I believe that we will find a way to survive, as dumb as people are we are also very resourceful and I think we will find a way to make all this technology work and stuff be able to support ourselves. Afterall we did find ways to bring ourselves out of the great depression and several recessions, we can do it again if we work together.
The Negative Impact of Technological Innovation on the Job Market and Society. (2023, Mar 22). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-negative-impact-of-technological-innovation-on-the-job-market-and-society-essay
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