If I am not wrong, you can now even get yourself a robot girlfriend if you have failed to find your perfect woman.
For all these benefits of living in a connected world, there is one huge disconnect: the economy seems to be growing, but it is not creating jobs. This disconnect is not a temporary blip which will disappear with a full economic recovery. It is part of a longer-term structural change in the economy.
Now, many of us take for granted that technology is the brightest spot in the economy, where most of the innovation and job creation occurs. But if you look more broadly at the impact of technology across every industry, it doesn’t look so great. Technology makes businesses more efficient, often by eliminating the need for repetitive tasks and the workers who do them. We are not replacing those jobs with enough new, higher-skilled ones to make up for the loss.
So what we are seeing in the U.S. (most developed nation) over the past decade is productivity growth, without the job growth that usually comes with it. Traditionally, productivity growth and job growth went hand in hand, but that is no longer the case. Annual productivity growth in the U.S. between 2000 and 2009 was 2.5%, a faster rate than at any time since the 1960s. Yet the last decade saw the total number of jobs decline by 1.1 percent.
The official unemployment rate in the U.S. is 9.1 percent, with 13.9 million out of work. Median wages in the U.S. have gone almost nowhere since the 1970s. Meanwhile, income disparity between the richest 1 percent and everyone else keeps growing.
Is the U.S. worker is in the same position today as the workhorse was 100 years ago when it was replaced by another technology: the engine (first steam, and then internal combustion). Peak employment for horses was in 1901, there were 3.25 million working horses in the England. Those jobs went away with the introduction of machinery, tractors, cars, and trucks.
Today, workers in factories are being replaced by robots and software, more broadly, is automating many jobs that people used to do. Companies are benefitted because they can operate leaner and make more profits, but what about the people? For the first time ever, the Luddite fear that machines will replace people seems to be coming true. “It’s one of the dirty secrets of economics: technology progress does grow the economy and create wealth, but there is no economic law that says everyone will benefit.” In other words, in the race against the machine, some are likely to win while many others lose. Technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating and this is evident in the economic situation of jobless recovery prevailing in the U.S. even two years post-recession.
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