The discussion of automation and robots displacing humans in the job market rages on. William Lazonick of Alternet says the fear shouldn’t be of automation, but misuse of profits:
To repeat, automation is not the problem. The three-decades long erosion of middle-class jobs in the United States is the result of, as stated earlier, permanent plant closings, layoffs of older employees, and the globalization of employment – none of which have been the result of automation. In the process, many US industrial corporations have become very profitable (for now, but by no means forever). The question that needs to be asked is why US corporations are failing to reinvest these profits in new products and processes that can create large numbers of new high value-added employment opportunities in the United States.
The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to“maximize shareholder value,” which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since. In the name of shareholder value over the decade 2001-2010, the 500 corporations in the S&P 500 Index (representing about 75 percent of US stock-market capitalization) expended not only 40 percent of their profits on cash dividends – the normal mode of rewarding shareholders – but also another 54 percent on stock buybacks, the purpose of which is to give a manipulative boost to a company’s own stock price. Large established companies did hardly any buybacks in the early 1980s. Over the past decade, buybacks by S&P 500 companies totaled about $3 trillion, which has left scant corporate resources for investment in innovation and high-value-added job creation.
Meanwhile, Will Knight at MIT Technology Review says that we’re not at a point yet to start worrying:
Last year, in fact, two MIT Sloan Business school researchers, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, published an e-book called Race against the Machine, in which they argue that recent technological changes, primarily in information technology, have begun transforming labor in some disturbing ways. These advances have coincided with jobs disappearing more quickly than new ones are created, they wrote, adding that a similar shift could happen elsewhere as robot technology improves (see “Tectonic Shifts in Employment” and “When Robots Do Your Job”).
We’ve yet to see any evidence of this shift in robotics, though. A little over a year ago, the International Federation of Robotics published a report showing that the rapid growth in the use of industrial robots over the past 50 years has coincided with no overall decrease in employment in most countries.
And, finally, use of autonomous vehicles in agriculture has been on the rise in the United Kingdom:
David Gardner, Chief Executive of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, pointed out robots are already milking cows.
Within the next 20 to 40 years, he said that robots will be able to cultivate land, ‘zap’ weeds and pick fruit and vegetables.
Already Fendt, a German company, are hoping to make a driverless tractor available by 2014. Farmers would control two tractors from one cab. It could be used in flat, large fields in East Anglia within a couple of years for repetitive tasks like de-stoning the soil on vegetable beds.
