More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production
While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first &quot;high tech&quot; jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the company contract a programmer-friend of mine to automate the process and two weeks later I was looking for work--my job replaced by a script that ran a few minutes every morning.<p>Over the years I&#x27;ve watched various professions devalued to search engines and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a bad thing. It&#x27;s progress and it&#x27;s freeing up time. The bad part is that we live in a society with an antiquated work-ethic, where your value is measured in capital and the number of hours you put in each week at your job. Automation isn&#x27;t the problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs to change.