Robots will make half the world's jobs disappear in 2 decades

[Magical Realist]

"Two hugely important statistics concerning the future of employment as we know it made waves recently:

1. 85 people alone command as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.

2. 47 percent of the world's currently existing jobs are likely to be automated over the next two decades.

Combined, those two stats portend a quickly-exacerbating dystopia. As more and more automated machinery (robots, if you like) are brought in to generate efficiency gains for companies, more and more jobs will be displaced, and more and more income will accumulate higher up the corporate ladder. The inequality gulf will widen as jobs grow permanently scarce—there are only so many service sector jobs to replace manufacturing ones as it is—and the latest wave of automation will hijack not just factory workers but accountants, telemarketers, and real estate agents.

That's according to a 2013 Oxford study, which was highlighted in this week's Economist cover story. That study attempted to tally up the number of jobs that were susceptible to automization, and, surprise, a huge number were. Creative and skilled jobs done by humans were the most secure—think pastors, editors, and dentists—but just about any rote task at all is now up for automation. Machinists, typists, even retail jobs, are predicted to disappear.

And, as is historically the case, the capitalists eat the benefits. The Economist explains:

"The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%."====http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-ric...-disappear

[scheherazade]

This is not the first time that we have been down this path. The change does seem to be more difficult for men because of their traditional role as provider and how our society tends to define individuals by their work.

Many men lost their jobs when technology made them obsolete. The new jobs available were soul-crushing, undignified, and required an arduous commute—and that’s assuming companies would hire them. Most employers wouldn’t, because the men were considered too old and unskilled for the new work. And then a false prophet with messy hair emerged, promising to give power back to workers and decried the indignity of what work had become.


Sounds familiar? I’m not describing the current economy, but 19th century England during the industrial revolution. Back then, technology also radically altered how humans worked. It upset men’s place in society. And it makes what’s happening today seem tame.
http://qz.com/693351/technology-masculin...pockethits

The unequal division of the profits of labor will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Our current model of capitalism has long been unsustainable and I am very interested to see how that ideology struggles to survive going forward.