Work and New Technologies in Western Societies

Abstract

Job replacement and new technologiesSocial literature shows the positive effect new technologies have on productivity and growth, thanks to the gradual application of artificial intelligence and automation to the manufacturing of traditional and new goods and services (Brynjolfsson andMcAfee 2011 and2014). Minds, media, and ideas have created a new technological society 2 , which is populated by machines that are able to listen, talk, operate, and even learn. They offer precision, quality, and efficiency in the carrying out of business activities, but they are taking away human jobs. This trend will become increasingly pronounced in our technological future. Technology is already in our daily life and the Davos powerful leaders said in 2016 that a new wave of family robots is going to take place.It has been estimated that the United States will run the risk of computerizing 47% of current jobs in the next fifteen years. This will relate to about 700 types of jobs (Frey and Osborne 2013). The same will happen in Europe in the next twenty years when half of the current jobs will incur the same risk according to an evaluation of the Bruegel Foundation. A fast replacement of white and blue-collar workers with robots and automated machines has been already underway for twenty years in North America and Europe. Within information technology, in recent years, Google bought Youtube (65 employees) for $ 1.65 billion (25 million per employed) and Facebook both Instagram (13 employees) for one billion dollars (77 million to busy) and, in 2014, WhatsApp (55 employees) for $ 19 billion (345 million to busy). These purchases reveal that new technologies require Internet intake of human labor and, at the same time, propel wealth in a few hands.In a medium-term perspective, the estimated acceleration of biomedical engineering will also affect nonroutine professions (Clifford and Clifton 2012), which are very delicate and powerful in social systems. This is already happening with the processing of information and the diagnosis of diseases through artificial intelligence. Many jobs have been eliminated and replaced by new technologies in the industry, logistics, financial and commercial intermediation. From this point of view, Keynes"s prediction about technological unemployment (which was described as the disease of the future over eighty year ago) appears to be more truthful than the theory of Solow residual (outlined over sixty years ago and stating that 80% of economic growth in the USA was due to technological progress, the protagonist of the new economy) 3 .