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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  1886 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite

Three loosely connected thoughts.

Bloomberg recently posted an opinion piece titled "Too Many Americans Will Never Be Able To Retire" that discussed our aging population and workforce, our having less kids, and funding social safety nets. I felt that the piece was incomplete, as automation and how it will affect our future workforce and economy was a glaring omission.

This piece seems to be the flip side of a recent Voice of America article . . .

I got a thought in my head recently, don't remember if it came from an article or a headline of a comment on the internet, I do know it's not mine though. Automation isn't a threat to our jobs. The threat to our jobs are employers choosing to not employ us. Its overly blunt and lacks nuance, but there's a little something there.





kleinbl00  ·  1886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The WSJ has a whole series of articles under the "Unprepared" tag that are pretty horrific. But it's not like they're being alarmist.

The situation hasn't changed since the Luddites: technological change destroys jobs. It also makes them. A report during LBJ's presidential term pointed out that technology doesn't impact work, it impacts jobs and that the faster you can get people retrained, the better the whole economy will fare. It also lamented the poor lost souls mining coal in the foothills and what will we do with their poor broke unemployable asses. In 1964.

The future belongs to the people who see the change in the weather. For most people, though, "I'm going to go find myself a new career" is a hard goddamn thing to do when your current one is going well and entirely too late when your career is “undergoing digital transformation.”