Jobs, jobs jobs...someone is taking them!

Whether it's complaints about how 'ferners are entering illegally and taking our jobs, or how greedy CEOs are outsourcing those jobs oversees, no one talks about the elephant in the kitchen...automation.

More and more jobs are lost each year to robots,...

and other forms of automation. You can hardly turn on a talk show without hearing someone whine about job losses or how some politician is going to 'create' jobs, yet no-one ever complains about jobs lost to automation.

Why not? Where are the Luddites when you need them? Is it really so much worse to lose a crappy job to an immigrant than it is to lose it to a machine? The day is fast approaching where we will all lose our jobs to technology. In that post labor world, which people like Ray Kurzweil argue is a mere 20-40 years away, will people still complain about the loss of jobs?

Agreed, a lot of computer science, data entry, data gathering, collection jobs = lost to automation.

Calls on phone? Automated. Decline in real mail - blame it on email. Decline in fax transmissions? Blame it on email PDF.

Decline in house cleaning service demand? Blame it on the roomba

Decline in automotive worker jobs = blame it on industrial robots.

Yep, it's definitely an issue, and nope, nobody likes to talk about it. I can visit a local office to buy insurance, OR I can walk an automated process online to accomplish the same task. One takes a human (on the sales side) hours, the other takes a few minutes to review...result? Less employees needed in the overall sales process of insurance which means, again, less jobs.

I don't think all jobs will be lost to technology, but it's true that factors like automation are causing the job market to shrink in many sectors. Combined with the growth in population, this is a serious problem.

Has anybody ever read The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov? It anticipates a world where computer automation has completely replaced human labor. It goes a step further and supposes a world where humans have become so dependent on computers and have lived with them so long, that humans have forgotten how to perform the simplest mathematical calculations. After a few humans regain and demonstrate the ability to do simple arithmetic, a trend begins where human governments seek human labor to replace computer automation, believing it to be a decisive advantage over their enemies.

An interesting scenario...

I haven't read that, but IMHO, the Singularitarians make a more compelling argument that we will not be replaced by machines. We will merge with them and become machines.

Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict this process will begin in earnest in about 20 years. But for some reason, futurist predictions tend to be off by about 20 years. I'm not sure why. But that being the case, it might still really happen in our lifetimes.