Robots kill middle-class jobs. Should they be paid minimum wage?

bubbaclot

Robots kill middle-class jobs

As economy recovers, advances in technology reshape employment

BERNARD CONDON and PAUL WISEMAN | Associated Press

Associated Press
Brake drums roll down a conveyor belt to be robotically balanced at Webb Wheel Products in Cullman, Ala., which has added production without hiring.
NEW YORK – Five years after the start of the latest economic recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.

And the situation is even worse than it appears.

Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What’s more, these jobs aren’t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren’t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.

They’re being obliterated by technology.

Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done.

For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.

“The jobs that are going away aren’t coming back,” says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of “Race Against the Machine.” “I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years.”

The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they’re on the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are disappearing.

“There’s no sector of the economy that’s going to get a pass,” says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote “The Lights in the Tunnel,” a book predicting widespread job losses. “It’s everywhere.”

The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the recession paid middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are midpay. Nearly 70 percent are low-paying jobs; 29 percent pay well.

In the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency, the numbers are even worse. Almost 4.3 million low-pay jobs have been gained since mid-2009, but the loss of midpay jobs has never stopped. A total of 7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through last June.

Some occupations are beneficiaries of the march of technology, such as software engineers and app designers for smartphones and tablet computers. But, overall, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating.

You can call me a troll all you want but I'm urging you people to step your game up and do it quick. Don't get caught in the hype of begging for pennies and handouts.

Theirs a different strategy being played behind the scenes.

It's a set up. Think about it.

unspoken_respect

A.I. will cause the apocalypse.

Oh.........this isn't about that.

Black_Samson

obama does loves his technology...
plenty pictures of him awestruck by a robot of some sort...

best example of this is the massive downsizing of the military.
it's part trying to push the old blood out and part because tech has gotten better and requires less manpower....
even though most that shit is a 4 man lift...

bubbaclot

Technology’s march

To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs, and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP’s key findings:

•Over the past 50 years, technology has drastically reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing. Robots and other machines controlled by computer programs work faster and make fewer mistakes than humans. Now, that same efficiency is being unleashed in the service economy.

•Technology is being adopted by every kind of organization that employs people. It’s replacing workers in large corporations and small businesses, established companies and startups, schools, hospitals, nonprofits and the military.

•The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that programmers can write software for – an accountant checking a list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal reviewing documents for key words to help in a case.

•Startups account for most of the job growth in developed economies. Thanks to software, entrepreneurs are launching businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s.

•It’s becoming a self-serve world. Instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or our personal lives, we use technology to do tasks ourselves. This trend will grow as software permeates our lives.

•Technology is replacing workers in developed countries regardless of their politics, policies and laws.

The lingering pain of the recession is not entirely a result of technology’s advances. Other factors are keeping companies from hiring – partisan gridlock in the U.S., for instance, and the debt crisis in Europe, which has led to deep government spending cuts.

But to the extent technology has played a role, it raises the specter of high unemployment even after political troubles lift and economic growth accelerates.

Premeer

i was just complaining about this recently. its irritating when you call a business and all you can reach is a damn machine talking bout press "this" for that and "that" for this...

how about send me straight to a human being. they can deal with what i need much easier and faster than a damn machine giving me the dial pad run-around.

jono

What is the point of this topic? To reiterate what any decently aware person already knows?

kingblaze84

Technology is definitely killing many jobs, I do debt settlement and my office used to have a lot of people. Over the last 3 years, lots of people have gotten laid off since they're not needed anymore. Nowadays, people are doing the work of 3-4 people using technology to help out. This isn't a good sign for America's future. People who are making the robots though will do well, that's why future generations must study science and math more seriously. But eventually, those tech jobs will be taken by robots too smh. Maybe capitalism is dying out....time for some new form of economy imo

bubbaclot

Population Control. Once robots/computers start replacing humans in the labor force, poor people will not be needed.

Premeer

this thread reminds me of iRobot...

like i been saying, "they" use hollywood to show us whats to come in this world. from concepts, technology, to the direction of society.

Wild Self

Broke people soon gonna get wiped out and population control measures are gonna be used.

Law Trafalgar

Killing jobs nobody else wanted to do.

Premeer

Vaas wrote: »

Killing jobs nobody else wanted to do.

dont matter. they were still jobs.

how many jobs do people actually want to do.

the ill community stupid poster population is at a all time high