knowlessman

knowlessman t1_ivthfd8 wrote

14% of surveyed current-day workers have lost their jobs to robots.

What about the former workers who had already lost their jobs? There have been many rounds of robotic automation going back decades. The first generation of workers to lose their jobs to robots would largely be retired by now anyway.

What about the roles never created? Remember, banks, hospitals, etc. used to have rooms full of people to do all the accounting. Hundreds of people for one company, and nowadays it’s usually 1-5 people. That happened so long ago that most people in the workforce today never worked at a time when those jobs existed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m solidly “yay automation let’s put the machines to work and figure out a better way for us to live” camp, but I think surveying current day workers about whether they have lost a job for this reason is not a good method for finding out how many workers have actually lost jobs for this reason.

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