Technology and jobs


There is a popular belief that increasing use of technology means fewer jobs. That belief took hold way back at the beginning if the industrial revolution with Luddite activism:
"The Luddites were a secret oath-based organisation of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group are believed to have taken their name from Ned Ludd, a weaver from Anstey, near Leicester."
So, there are some 200 years worth of predictions that have not come to pass, otherwise we should have massive unemployment by now.
The prediction seems intuitively correct, so what has actually happened? As usual, the 'devil' is in the details:
Let's take a car as an example and compare Henry Ford's Model T to the average family car today. Apart from having four wheels, an engine and brakes in common, the complexity of content in the modern vehicle is an order of magnitude higher than the Model T's.
So, in effect, the number of workers needed to produce a modern car is likely not so different from the Model T.
New technologies are constantly evolving as well requiring workers of one kind or another.
There you have it, in a nutshell.

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