Technology to kill more Jobs

Technology has made the pace of change increase manifold in recent times and have made things increasingly difficult for the professional workforce around the world. Earlier technology change had made manufacturing jobs redundant, due to improving automation as well outsourcing of jobs to low cost third world locations. This trend has now moved on to the service industry where intelligent machines are now taking the jobs of the semi-skilled and lower skilled service workers. Only the highly skilled workers will remain or those who can learn new skills rapidly as new professions get created.

Though jobs in the US are increasing in the last couple of years, wages have been falling as most jobs are being created in very low skill, low wage service sector. Zerohedge recently reported that there are now more waiters and bartenders than manufacturing workers in the USA. Even these jobs will be redundant as robots are increasingly being able to do these routine jobs, which do not require higher thinking skills. The jobs of truck drivers and cab drivers are also at high risk as automated driver-less cars are already being test driven and allowed by municipal authorizes. Millions of people who work in these jobs will find themselves outmaneuvered by machines, who will be able to do their jobs more safely and at a far lower cost than humans.

It is not uncommon these days to find that people have lost their jobs. This was unthinkable in the old days when people used to work on the same job with the same company till they retired. Now except for government jobs, it is hard to think of anybody working with the same company unless they own it. What this trend is also doing is creating inequality, as it gives more power to the capital owner and less to the labor provider. The capital owner can get most of his work done through equipment without any use for human labor, except for some high end specialized services. The cheap common services are already going for subsistence level (go to fiverr.com if you want to find out), while the specialized services sell for exorbitant rates. This is creating two very unequal classes of capital owners plus provider of highly specialized services on one hand; and cheap commoditized labor providers on the other hand.

 ET

A paradigm shift is expected to be witnessed in the way workplaces operate over the next 15 years, making nearly 50 per cent of occupations existing today redundant by 2025, a report has said.Artificial intelligence will transform businesses and the work that people do. Process work, customer work and vast swathes of middle management will simply disappear, it said. “Nearly 50 per cent of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025. New jobs will require creative intelligence, social and emotional intelligence and ability to leverage artificial intelligence. Those jobs will be immensely more fulfilling than today’s jobs,” the report said.