Certainly jobs will inevitably be lost; however, this has been happening all my working life. When I first started work we had bus conductors, car park attendants, forecourt oil and tyre check attendants, cloak room attendants, wash room attendants, half a dozen bank tellers per branch and real live check-out chicks.
When the manager at one of the UK ford plants was showing off the new car assembly line robots back in the 1970’s it was the union shop steward that pointed out that the robots don’t buy new cars!
I also recall a conversation I was having in a unionized North Queensland mine I was told that it had taken the company twenty years to have the fireman removed from the diesel locomotives. The same chap also told me it would not take them twenty years to remove the driver! I doubt it will as we already have autonomous mining trucks running between the shovel and dump station.
When I was at school during the 1960’s there was talk of the Age of Aquarius when machines would take over the work and we should prepare to spend our time reading Chaucer, Shakespeare and such like to fill in our days.
So far it’s been mainly in the blue collar working sectors; however, just wait until you can consult with an Indian doctor, lawyer, accountant and other professional services from the comfort of your own computer.
I think in the future we will be astounded by the rate of technological change and the subsequent job losses.
Still at least we know here in Australia we have a competent set of politicians that are probably working on the social changes coming our way and that they have a plan to compensate for the income tax reductions and additional welfare payments for the future unemployed.
They could probably have a look at the multi-national companies currently making out like tax free bandits as they rape and pillage our resources and sell their electronic gadgets into our markets from some over-seas tax haven. No sorry best forget that last one, not feasible. I’ve noticed lately that I often slip from the sarcastic to the foolish fairly easily.
I understand that one of the growing industries is online shopping (bye-bye high street jobs) and packaging and delivering goods by courier; however, even that industry is already cutting back on real jobs for humans.
