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posted by cmn32480 on Monday June 08 2015, @10:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.

Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.

But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.

This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.


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  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday June 08 2015, @06:41PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Monday June 08 2015, @06:41PM (#193758)

    For a very short amount of time you can generate a financial bubble, everyone loses in a bubble except the rich guys who ran it, who happen to be in charge, which is why since 2000 or so the economy has been solely based on bubble formation and popping rather than industrial or even post-industrial. The era of the knowledge economy ended in the 90s and the new economic era is called the bubble era...

    There is nothing new about about an economy based on bubbles. It is the basis of Reaganomics, which itself was nothing more than a start in returning us to the economic policies that were the standard before the Great Depression and the New Deal. Since 1980, that has been the de facto economic policy, regardless of which administration has been in charge. It is always a benefit to those at the very top and somehow everyone else keeps believing that wealth will someday "trickle down. In the meantime the gap in wealth between those at the top and the rest of us has been rapidly increasing and will continue to do so as long as we let it happen.

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