WEBVTT

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does technology actually kill jobs while automation doesn't really seem to reduce

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the overall number of jobs in an economy there are numerous professions that have

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entirely disappeared primarily due to technological innovation if you're

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worried about losing your job due to a major future technological shift it

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makes sense to look at some case studies from the past and ask how historical

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waves of automation led to the economy we have today anxiety over technology

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and automation as drivers of job and wage losses has been a common thing in

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our culture pretty much since the Industrial Revolution the word Lite

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typically used to describe someone as anti-technology or anti-progress has its

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roots in the Lite labor movement this was a group of skilled Weavers in 19th

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century England who broke the Machinery that was being used to replace them the

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problem with this Machinery in the eyes of the leites wasn't just that it might

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reduce the overall number of jobs but that it meant that highly skilled

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well-compensated Artisans could be replaced with easily interchangeable low

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paid machine operators for programmable looms and they weren't entirely wrong

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while there are still plenty of people employed in the Garment industry today

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very few of them are in the UK and the global market is dominated by shily

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constructed clothes made of cheap lowquality textiles that are designed to

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avoid many sewing knitting and crocheting techniques that machines

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struggle to imitate even modern forms of automation like AI are often supported

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by small armies of overseas workers such as Amazon's just walk out program were

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customers could just grab an item off the shelf and leave these stores relied

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on a large number of support workers reviewing transactions and tagging

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footage with metadata for training in order to create this supposedly

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cashierless experience but of course there are a lot of jobs that were

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successfully deleted by the rise of mechanization some have been so

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thoroughly obliterated that it's hard for us to even recognize that once upon

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a time those jobs must have existed one example is that of a knocker upper which

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just so we're clear has nothing to do with pregnancy getting knocked up by the

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mailman used to mean something very different prior to the invention and

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proliferation of cheap and reliable mechanical alarm clocks there used to be

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an entire profession of night owls who went around knocking on doors and

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Windows early in the morning to ensure that other people woke up on time they

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typically carried a long light stick to wrap on the Windows of bedrooms on the

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upper floors though some were known to carry peashooters so that they could

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shoot dry peas at the Windows instead I don't know how you're supposed to hit

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snooze probably have to go down there and fight them the profession of knocker

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upper actually lasted a lot longer than you might think it had mostly died out

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by the 1940s but still existed in some areas of England until the 1970s another

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example of a less old timey occupation that was created and then destroyed by a

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single invention is switchboard operators the profession's Heyday was

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only a few short decades with the first operator hired in 1878 and automated

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exchanges introduced in the 1890s and proliferating through the early 1900s

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this profession again hung on for a surprisingly long time with some manual

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central office switchboards lasting until the early '90s in a few rural

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areas but if this all feels like ancient history what about the professions that

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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

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declined significantly over the last several decades is that of TV repair

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technicians don't get me wrong they're still around and many of them have

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simply broaden their skill sets rather than just specializing purely in

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televisions however the demand for television repair has significantly

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decreased in part because the average television sold has become both cheaper

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to buy and more complicated to repair that complication is partially due to

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the Advent of smart TVs and Teensy tiny

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integrated Electronics but also due to a lot of intentionally repair hostile

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design likewise televisions improve fast enough from year to year that many users

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simply choose to buy a new and improved model rather than fixing their broken

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device televisions used to be an expensive valuable Appliance but there's

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been a distinct cultural shift where we've started to treat them as

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disposable and it's had a measurable impact on Independent repair jobs here's

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another fun one we tend to forget that once upon a time the word computer did

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not refer to a machine brain a computer was a person whose job was to compute

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the term originates in the 17th century when scientists and observatories would

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hire assistance to perform from all the tedious mathematical calculations needed

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to make astronomical predictions the original astronomy supercomputer was

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literally just a room full of dudes doing math by the end of the 19th

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century however nearly all computers were women primarily because Computing

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was seen as a rote menial work and well-educated Men didn't want to do it

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as discussed in the 2016 film hidden figures NASA launches in the late 1950s

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and early 1960s relied on female human

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computers to calculate trajectories and orbital mechanics one of the first

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things modern computers replaced was

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computers what all the jobs we've already mentioned had in common is that

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they were mostly Blue Collar trades or low status White Collar positions they

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definitely required their own degree of skill but we've largely become

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accustomed to the idea that manufacturing and other physical jobs

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can and eventually will be automated an important factor that distinguishes the

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newest threat of automation though is that it increasingly seems to be that

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knowledge-based white colar jobs are equally at risk so expect to read a lot

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of modelin think pieces about that's what happens when writers get fired and

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have too much time on their hands machine translation and computer assisted DIY legal and accounting

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services still haven't hit the point where they're a one to1 replacement for

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an actual human professional but there's going to be a Tipping Point where these

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automated services are good enough for basic tasks and cheap enough that the

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remaining quality gap won't matter to a lot of people who need these services

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and for some of these jobs it's already happening artists are in a similar

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position you're still going to need human beings to make good art but it's

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quite likely that you'll be able to make more good art faster with fewer people

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it's also already clear that a lot of people don't care about the quality and

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consistency gap between generated art and professional art from a human artist

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and those people are just going to go with the cheaper option if all this

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history has you feeling a little depressed it's worth repeating that none

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of these waves of automation or disappearing professions actually appear

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to have reduced the overall percentage of people with jobs in fact high levels

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of Automation in a country tend to correlate with high levels of Workforce

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participation not the opposite it's possible that this round will be

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different and we really will see automation push a large percentage of

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people into unemployment but everything we've learned from history says

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otherwise besides you can always become a streamer hey thanks for watching and

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if you like this video maybe you'll also like this one about Amish computers they

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exist don't forget to like And subscribe