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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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:10AM
Exactly my point. It's yet another point of dishonesty (in addition to your habit of routinely mischaracterizing my arguments) that you equate variation of policy with policy that scales to the actual alleged needs of regions. One-size-fits-all is still the norm for minimum wage policy despite your many assertions to the contrary, it's just that the parties implementing these policies don't have the power to implement them on a larger scale.
There are two consequences of this that are particularly troublesome. First, that regions that are low cost of living are massively screwed. Puerto Rico being a good example (I believe Fresno, California will be another, should California fully implement its $15 per hour minimum wage in 2022 and inflation not eat up the difference).
Second, that businesses have to contend with massive variation in minimum wage and abrupt changes in minimum wage depending on the whims of all these governments interacting together. My second suggested approach doesn't eliminate the problem, but it at least makes it based on reasonably predictable economic parameters that can be forecast out several years rather than whatever some city or state government cooks up.