11 Times Tech Really Did Take Our Jobs
Artificial intelligence is replacing hundreds of jobs in the US, leading to skepticism and uncertainty about the future of humanity. It’s a disheartening development as even the inventor of the AI has warned of a possible takeover of the technology.
TThe reality is that for centuries jobs have been crowded out by new technological developments that pave the way for mass production and provoked outrage among those who depended on those jobs. From women working in the textile industry to switchboard operators in the 1970s to the 2000s when video streaming services replaced physical video stores.
With every technological development that made certain jobs obsolete, people protested, including the economist Maynard Keynes, who coined a term for the phenomenon.
“A new disease is afflicting us,” Keynes wrote in one published essay in 1930. The disease, he wrote, was “‘technological unemployment'”.
“From the 16th century, with a cumulative crescendo after the 18th, began the great age of science and technical invention,” he added, citing the turn to other methods of mass production that he said was “in high tide”. since the beginning of the 19th century.
A look into the past can be a good place to start when looking at the future of technology in the 21st century after a year report found by Challenger, Gray and Christmas, Inc Almost 4,000 job cuts in the last month have been replaced by AI. Fears of further AI advances are real and the impact they are having on workers’ livelihoods cannot be underestimated, but if history shows anything, humans are resilient and adaptable.
And like Walter Reuther, the founder and former president of the United Automobile Workers Union and labor and civil rights activist from the mid-1940s to the 1960s called“Either we will use our new machines and technology to bring safety and dignity in building a brave new world, or the impact of jet propulsion technology on a puffing Model T distribution system will dig our economic graves.”
The following Jobs have become almost or completely obsolete thanks to technological advances, showing that history is not so different from today.
