Does Technology Destroy Jobs?
6th October 2013
Mike Masnick doesn’t think so.
In the short-term tech-kills-jobs view, you could easily see this new “technology” as killing jobs. Indeed, it’s reported that there are somewhere around 18,000 telephone operators in the US today. But… there are also about 100,000 call center operators and 290,000 telemarketers (and of course, in a globalized world, many of those jobs have moved overseas). But, more importantly, moving from having a human operator connect you to an automatic switched network was just an early step in leading to tremendous follow-on innovations that created all kinds of new jobs and economic growth. Automatic switched phone networks created all kinds of new business opportunities and convenience, but also eventually enabled easy access to the internet. And the internet has since created millions of new jobs (including mine!).
Yeah, but for whom? I doubt that Mike Masnick would have been a telephone operator in any conceivable parallel universe. The point of concern about technology and jobs is not that the absolute number of jobs might be less — it obviously is not — but who gets the jobs that result? Eliminating jobs for average-IQ people and creating new jobs for high-IQ people still leaves more and more average-IQ people out of work. Nobody I know of worries about high-IQ people getting work — it’s the average and low-IQ people that are worrisome. This is not Lake Woebegone — by definition, half of the population has a below-average IQ. When my parents were in their 30s and 40s, somebody of average intelligence with a high-school education (which was really a high-school education in those days, not just marginally functional literacy and numeracy masquerading as such) could get a semi-skilled job and make enough to buy a house and support a family. That day is rapidly disappearing, if it hasn’t disappeared already.
Bessen does note that the type of work and skills may change — tellers are more focused on more complex transactions rather than simple ones, just like call center employees have to help customers with problems, rather than just connect person A to person B. But is that such a bad thing?
Yeah, if you’re the guy who doesn’t have the brainpower to handle these complex transactions. People like Mike Masnick live in a high-IQ bubble of tech people and journalists; they need to get out to 7-11 and Walmart and find out what the Lower Half is actually going through.