does technology actually kill jobs while automation doesn't really seem to reduce
the overall number of jobs in an economy there are numerous professions that have
entirely disappeared primarily due to technological innovation if you're
worried about losing your job due to a major future technological shift it
makes sense to look at some case studies from the past and ask how historical
waves of automation led to the economy we have today anxiety over technology
and automation as drivers of job and wage losses has been a common thing in
our culture pretty much since the Industrial Revolution the word Lite
typically used to describe someone as anti-technology or anti-progress has its
roots in the Lite labor movement this was a group of skilled Weavers in 19th
century England who broke the Machinery that was being used to replace them the
problem with this Machinery in the eyes of the leites wasn't just that it might
reduce the overall number of jobs but that it meant that highly skilled
well-compensated Artisans could be replaced with easily interchangeable low
paid machine operators for programmable looms and they weren't entirely wrong
while there are still plenty of people employed in the Garment industry today
very few of them are in the UK and the global market is dominated by shily
constructed clothes made of cheap lowquality textiles that are designed to
avoid many sewing knitting and crocheting techniques that machines
struggle to imitate even modern forms of automation like AI are often supported
by small armies of overseas workers such as Amazon's just walk out program were
customers could just grab an item off the shelf and leave these stores relied
on a large number of support workers reviewing transactions and tagging
footage with metadata for training in order to create this supposedly
cashierless experience but of course there are a lot of jobs that were
successfully deleted by the rise of mechanization some have been so
thoroughly obliterated that it's hard for us to even recognize that once upon
a time those jobs must have existed one example is that of a knocker upper which
just so we're clear has nothing to do with pregnancy getting knocked up by the
mailman used to mean something very different prior to the invention and
proliferation of cheap and reliable mechanical alarm clocks there used to be
an entire profession of night owls who went around knocking on doors and
Windows early in the morning to ensure that other people woke up on time they
typically carried a long light stick to wrap on the Windows of bedrooms on the
upper floors though some were known to carry peashooters so that they could
shoot dry peas at the Windows instead I don't know how you're supposed to hit
snooze probably have to go down there and fight them the profession of knocker
upper actually lasted a lot longer than you might think it had mostly died out
by the 1940s but still existed in some areas of England until the 1970s another
example of a less old timey occupation that was created and then destroyed by a
single invention is switchboard operators the profession's Heyday was
only a few short decades with the first operator hired in 1878 and automated
exchanges introduced in the 1890s and proliferating through the early 1900s
this profession again hung on for a surprisingly long time with some manual
central office switchboards lasting until the early '90s in a few rural
areas but if this all feels like ancient history what about the professions that
have died within living memory of people younger than me we'll tell you after we
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today at back blaze.com tequ a more modern profession that has
declined significantly over the last several decades is that of TV repair
technicians don't get me wrong they're still around and many of them have
simply broaden their skill sets rather than just specializing purely in
televisions however the demand for television repair has significantly
decreased in part because the average television sold has become both cheaper
to buy and more complicated to repair that complication is partially due to
the Advent of smart TVs and Teensy tiny
integrated Electronics but also due to a lot of intentionally repair hostile
design likewise televisions improve fast enough from year to year that many users
simply choose to buy a new and improved model rather than fixing their broken
device televisions used to be an expensive valuable Appliance but there's
been a distinct cultural shift where we've started to treat them as
disposable and it's had a measurable impact on Independent repair jobs here's
another fun one we tend to forget that once upon a time the word computer did
not refer to a machine brain a computer was a person whose job was to compute
the term originates in the 17th century when scientists and observatories would
hire assistance to perform from all the tedious mathematical calculations needed
to make astronomical predictions the original astronomy supercomputer was
literally just a room full of dudes doing math by the end of the 19th
century however nearly all computers were women primarily because Computing
was seen as a rote menial work and well-educated Men didn't want to do it
as discussed in the 2016 film hidden figures NASA launches in the late 1950s
and early 1960s relied on female human
computers to calculate trajectories and orbital mechanics one of the first
things modern computers replaced was
computers what all the jobs we've already mentioned had in common is that
they were mostly Blue Collar trades or low status White Collar positions they
definitely required their own degree of skill but we've largely become
accustomed to the idea that manufacturing and other physical jobs
can and eventually will be automated an important factor that distinguishes the
newest threat of automation though is that it increasingly seems to be that
knowledge-based white colar jobs are equally at risk so expect to read a lot
of modelin think pieces about that's what happens when writers get fired and
have too much time on their hands machine translation and computer assisted DIY legal and accounting
services still haven't hit the point where they're a one to1 replacement for
an actual human professional but there's going to be a Tipping Point where these
automated services are good enough for basic tasks and cheap enough that the
remaining quality gap won't matter to a lot of people who need these services
and for some of these jobs it's already happening artists are in a similar
position you're still going to need human beings to make good art but it's
quite likely that you'll be able to make more good art faster with fewer people
it's also already clear that a lot of people don't care about the quality and
consistency gap between generated art and professional art from a human artist
and those people are just going to go with the cheaper option if all this
history has you feeling a little depressed it's worth repeating that none
of these waves of automation or disappearing professions actually appear
to have reduced the overall percentage of people with jobs in fact high levels
of Automation in a country tend to correlate with high levels of Workforce
participation not the opposite it's possible that this round will be
different and we really will see automation push a large percentage of
people into unemployment but everything we've learned from history says
otherwise besides you can always become a streamer hey thanks for watching and
if you like this video maybe you'll also like this one about Amish computers they
exist don't forget to like And subscribe