The World Bank has released its annual World Development Report, and the headline news this go round, as relayed by Bloomberg and others, is basically that “Robots Aren’t Killing Jobs.” Which, good news, if true.
The World Bank has released its annual World Development Repor t, and the headline news this go round, as relayed by Bloomberg and others, is basically that “Robots Aren’t Killing Jobs.” Which, good news, if true.
“This fear that robots have eliminated jobs—this fear is not supported by the evidence so far,” the World Bank’s Chief Economist, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, told Bloomberg. More specifically, the report notes that for every job that’s been lost, new ones have been created. “This is the fourth industrial revolution, there have been three before, and in each case we managed to survive so it’s not the case that machines completely eliminated humans,” Koujianou Goldberg said. “Eventually, we will adjust.”
Putting aside the fact that an untold number of workers lived absolutely miserable lives in the new jobs the first two industrial revolutions found for them after factory production eliminated their old ones (and lots of people did not in fact survive them), and that there is little doubt that automation has indeed recently erased a good many jobs, it is inspiring to hear that economists are optimistic that we will “eventually adjust” to our new robot-wielding overlords.
Still, it’s worth taking a minute to think about this report, as it embodies a very common outlook on automation, second in ubiquity maybe only to widespread fears of a total robot-jobs apocalypse. It goes something like this: Yes, automation seems scary to some because it involves robots, but those fears of the job-destroying machines are overblown. We’ve done this industrial revolution thing enough times before to know that technology only (eventually) improves our lives. And after all, stuff is cheaper to buy now, devices are higher-tech, and we’re living longer.
Plus, if you look at the data, for every job that has been lost to automation in the U. S., others have been gained; jobs have only moved, from manufacturing to service, or abroad, which is not really a big deal, because the net number of jobs is basically the same, and businesses are continuing to make a lot of money. The key thing (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) is to educate citizens and workers, to retrain them to be more nimble in a fast-moving world where technology is accelerating.
As it happens, I am both paraphrasing the overview of this very World Bank report— “The Changing Nature of Work” (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Automation)—and relaying what we might call the “business and managerial consultancy outlook on automation” in general, or BAMCOA, if acronyms are your thing, as they are mine, and is often voiced in places like the World Economic Forum, the Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, and, yes, the World Bank.
The World Bank report offers a good synopsis of this view, as evinced by its introduction:
Where to start.
