Zeitgeist: Moving Forward - Technological Unemployment (Snippet) (Repository)

Making homes using hammers and nails and wood with the state of our technology today, is really absurd and will go the way of our labor class in regards to manufacturing in the United States. Recently, there was a study by economist David Autor of MIT, that states that our middle class is obsolete and being replaced by automation. Quite simply, Mechanization is more productive, efficient and sustainable than human labor in virtually every sector of the economy today. Machines do not need vacations, breaks, insurance, pensions, and they can work 24 hours a day, everyday. The output potential and accuracy compared to human labor, is unmatched. The bottom line: repetitive human labor is becoming obsolete and impractical across the world. And the unemployment you see around you today is fundamentally the result of this evolution of efficiency in technology. For years, market economists have dismissed this growing pattern which could be called “Technological Unemployment”, because of the fact that new sectors always seemed to emerge to re-absorb the displaced workers. Today, the service sector is the only real hub left and currently employs over 80% of the American workforce with most industrialized countries maintaining a similar proportion. However, this sector is now being challenged increasingly by automated kiosks, automated restaurants, and even automated stores. Economists today are finally acknowledging what they had been denying for years: Not only is technological unemployment exacerbating the current labor crisis we see across the world due to the global economic downturn, but the more the recession deepens the faster the industries are mechanizing. The catch, which is not realized, is that the faster they mechanize to save money- the more they displace people- the more they reduce public purchasing power. This means that, while the corporation can produce everything more cheaply, fewer and fewer people will actually have money to buy anything regardless of how cheap they become. The bottom line is that the “labor for income” game is slowly coming to an end. In fact, if you take a moment to reflect on the jobs which are in existence today which automation could take over right now if applied, 75% of the global workforce could be replaced by mechanization tomorrow.