I work at company that uses the Newcomen engine to automate about ⅓ of the job of trained artisan laborers. Looking at the Watt engine those artisan laborers are now completely irrelevant. It's going to take years to build the supporting machinery around the Watt engine to completely eliminate those jobs, but today I am convinced that we are on the verge of massive unemployment. Today thousands of job types have just been made redundant.
What scares me is we are unprepared for the kind of change that a perpetual 20% unemployment rate is going to trigger.
Every new technology since the Industrial Revolution kicked off has been claimed to herald the elimination of millions of jobs and the dawn of permanent unemployment--and often they have eliminated millions of jobs, yet the permanent unemployment never comes. People in the past have always struggled to imagine the new jobs that will be created, and maybe we aren't any better at it.
What scares me is we are unprepared for the kind of change that a perpetual 20% unemployment rate is going to trigger.
Every new technology since the Industrial Revolution kicked off has been claimed to herald the elimination of millions of jobs and the dawn of permanent unemployment--and often they have eliminated millions of jobs, yet the permanent unemployment never comes. People in the past have always struggled to imagine the new jobs that will be created, and maybe we aren't any better at it.