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posted by janrinok on Monday June 11 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the cheery-start-to-the-week dept.

Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.

That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.

Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.

[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.

But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.


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  • (Score: 2) by ese002 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:47AM

    by ese002 (5306) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @01:47AM (#691733)

    5 years later, times are good enough again that your old job is available. But since you've been out of that line of work for 5 years, you're considered "entry-level" by HR drones, and you're competing with all the kids right out of school. Because of those factors, you're back to the $35K, but it's only for a little while, you hope to get to the $50K level faster than you did the last time.

    You are an optimist. Because your last job was entry-level but you are no longer a fresh-grad, HR doesn't know what to do with you. It will be another year or two before the supply of fresh grads gets tight before HR starts to consider "stale-grads" like you. You still start at entry-level but now your are two years deeper in debt and the next crash is two years closer.

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