People ridiculed the Luddites for opposing technological change that ultimately created current work. Today’s economic indicators don’t offer that hopeIf you put water on the stove and heat it up,it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Physicists call this a “phase transition”.
Automation, and driven by technological progress,has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking own for many years been engaged in a debate approximately the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will current technology spawn mass unemployment, or as the robots capture jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots capture over release or unveil – or even create – demand for current human jobs?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com