Does business efficiency through tech innovation kill more jobs than it creates?

A couple of points. First you likely underestimating the number of jobs created by the automation. Programmers, repair techs, customer service reps, salesmen (OK everything has it’s drawbacks), maybe additional memory or hardware upgrades required, etc. If it is paperless, your probably looking at some kind of back up system or off site data storage, the list goes on.

None of this helps your friend and that’s truly unfortunate. But the truth is, the old paradigm of the office secretary is gone. Typing and filing is simply not enough to get a good job anymore. When the automobile was invented, a lot of buggy craftsmen were put out of work. But the auto industry more than compensated for the lost jobs. They were just in a different industry. Today there is very little you can do without computer skills. And what few jobs there are don’t pay much. I could suggest she run for congress since they don’t seem to need any skills of any kind but that would be mean.

But the medical records are now more easily accessible for staff allowing them all to be more productive. When the HMO payouts essentially require a doctor to see 10–12 patients per hour, saving a doctor an hour of paperwork helps him or her focus on patients. The same staff can support more doctors. There should be a reduction in prescription errors. And specialists and referral doctors can see a patients history more easily.

I think it is a bit of a swings and roundabouts situation. While some jobs are being lost as technology takes over, others will be created because of technology. I asked a question the other day about book shops for instance. I think some areas of retail are definitely being affected by technology. I can buy books, CDs and other goods of that type very easily online and so I don’t need to visit a store (even if sometimes I would like to). So, jobs in those areas of retail will be cut. I noticed just the other day that a major fashion retailer in Queensland is planning to close a large number of its stores and of course places like Borders have closed.

In contrast though, I also work in the education field and I am now looking at text books that can be supplied to my students as e-books. This means someone has to convert those books into a digital format. That means someone will probably have to do some desktop publishing work too. Also, a lot of these books come with websites attached to them. Someone has to produce those websites and maintain them. This won’t replace all those retail jobs, but it will create jobs in another field.

Similarly, @Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard mentioned that in his local area, while there were few chain book stores, there are quite a few indie book stores. This means opportunities for local, small businesses may arise from these changes.

Technology is also driving a huge growth market in distance education. This will give people more flexible access to education from quality institutions. People who without technology, might not have been able to obtain a degree or even a postgraduate degree. This creates jobs for educators and admin people who have to manage all of those distance students’ needs.

So, we will lose some jobs, but as we lose them others may spring up in another field. (My name is Bella, I am a member of the Wall-of-Text Anonymous (WTA) support group. :D

Oh, hell no.

Consider that in the US alone, during the previous century we made a shift from a “mostly agrarian” economy, where the majority of people in the country worked in agriculture either on farms directly or indirectly in support of “farming”, and now have approximately 2% “farm employment” (I’m recalling statistics that I learned in the 70s; the numbers may be even lower now). That we don’t now have “most of the country” on unemployment should answer this question. (The same type of transition happened even more quickly after WW II, when we rapidly transitioned from a “full-out wartime” economy to a peacetime economy. We didn’t have an army of laid-off and discontented soldiers and sailors; instead we had a ready labor pool.)

The increased production and efficiencies in “farming” made it possible to develop entire new industries. Consider how much time and money is spent on “entertainment” in various forms, from television, movies and theater to professional sports and various other artistic and “leisure” professions. When employment is reduced in one area because of technological improvement it frees up labor to do other things. Okay, your friend is in a bind “right now” because obviously she can’t be a professional sports star now, but surely she can train to do something if she still wants to earn an income. The individual transitions are often difficult – wrenching and heartbreaking, in fact – but the US economy thrives on the shedding of jobs where people are less well employed to areas where they are more suited.

Your friend just needs to decide what she wants to do and is capable of doing, and then pursue that. She may benefit from impersonal counseling to test her various aptitudes and abilities, and recommendations for specific job training.

On average, improved efficiency in the economy is good. It makes people wealthier when they can make the same stuff at a smaller cost. The money is generally spent on other things, instead of on production, or the cost of the goods come down and are more affordable. In either case, the economy is stimulated, on average.

Of course, individuals get caught without the skills to make a transition from obsolete jobs to new jobs. People shouldn’t be surprised. Keep up with the changes or you’ll get left behind.

Not that I’m the first to tell you, but as the automatable jobs get taken over by machines, there will be more and more creative jobs for humans. Content is king, they say. Hmmm. What does fluther ask for, every day? They are terribly clever. They get it for free.

But what we do is marketable. Some day all the good people will be paid for doing this.

I’ve tried to look for data around this issue. It seems there is no good way to know.

It creates more jobs for knowledge workers and it kill more jobs for task workers and manual labor.

@mattbrowne My thoughts and feelings exactly, thanks.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir there is a perfect way to know. Look around you. What are people doing? If we were still living in the agrarian lifestyle of the 19th and early 20th century, would people be doing even a tenth of the variety of things that they are doing now?

I’m talking work choices and leisure, which represents work for whoever is providing the leisure opportunity (travel, entertainment, dining, sports, arts, you name it). What increases the array of opportunity (for employment and for leisure) is the totality of increases in productivity that efficiency, automation and technology provide. And if you want to live the agrarian lifestyle of the 18th and early 19th century, you have the opportunity to do that, too.

I also tend to disagree with @mattbrowne that it “kills more jobs” for task workers and manual labor”. Those jobs are still available, but the industries hiring those workers shift around. I don’t see those jobs “dying” at all until we make leaps in automation and artificial intelligence that aren’t even on the drawing board yet.

@CWOTUS – Technology also creates new jobs for task workers and manual labor. An example is the mass production of PCs and the advent of email. At the same time this not only killed jobs for people who were involved in the production of typewriters. A whole lot of people using typewrites were not needed anymore because knowledge workers started to use emails themselves instead of asking secretaries or whole departments in accounting to type letters and put them in envelopes. Which means while new jobs for task workers and manual labor were created in the process, a lot more were lost.

I would argue that longer education increased the relative number of knowledge workers compared to task workers and manual labor. More kids have to go to college to find a job. Unskilled jobs keep disappearing.