Does Technology Destroy Jobs? If Not What Does? by Mike Mish Shedlock

If technology destroys jobs, how come, if we are at the most advanced state of technology ever, we are not all unemployed? Perhaps technology creates more jobs than it destroys. That’s not the drift of about 85 percent of the articles on the Internet (the Drudge Report seems to have at least one new scary headline about automation per day), but it’s the truth. From Mike Mish Shedlock at mishtalk.com:

In light of my posts on robots, driverless vehicles, and automation, readers keep asking: where will the jobs come from?

I do not know, nor does anyone else. But does that mean jobs won’t come?

Is technology destroying jobs for the first time?

Daniel Lacalle on the Hedgeye blog offers this bold claim: Face It, Technology Does Not Destroy Jobs.

If you read some newspapers and politicians’ comments, it seems that technology companies are a threat and robots will take your job . The idea is interesting and has populated hundreds of pages of science fiction books that feed on a dystopic view of the future where humans are only an annecdote.

It’s an interesting idea, there’s only one problem. It is a fallacy.

The idea that technology will destroy jobs starts with exaggerated estimates – as always – with the objective of presenting a world in which there must be an intervention – fiscal, of course – from governments, in order to save you from a future that has always been wrongly predicted … But this time it’s different.

The empirical evidence of more than 140 years is that technology creates more jobs than it destroys and that there is nothing to fear of artificial intelligence. Randstad studies show that technology will create more than 1.25 million jobs in Spain alone over the next five years.

Evidence shows us that if technology really destroyed jobs, there would be no work today for anyone. The technological revolution we have seen in the past 30 years has been unparalleled and exponential, and there are more jobs, better salaries.

The best example is the German region of Baviera, one of the parts of the world with a higher degree of technification and robotization, and with a 2.6% unemployment. An all-time low. The same can be said about South Korea, and the world in general.

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