![]() ![]() The hope that machines might free us from toil has always been intertwined with the fear that they will rob us of our agency. What may be looming is something different: an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently. But throughout these reshufflings, the total number of jobs has always increased. Agricultural technology birthed the farming industry, the industrial revolution moved people into factories, and then globalization and automation moved them back out, giving rise to a nation of services. labor force has been shaped by millennia of technological progress. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth-at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.īut even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?įuturists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. They observe that the capabilities of machines-already formidable-continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low-robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. “The cultural breakdown matters even more than the economic breakdown.” ![]() “Youngstown’s story is America’s story, because it shows that when jobs go away, the cultural cohesion of a place is destroyed,” says John Russo, a professor of labor studies at Youngstown State University. Derek Thompson talks with editor in chief James Bennet about the state of jobs in America.
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