I went to a talk in April called “The robots are coming” by Dr. Heidi Shierholz in which she discussed incoming automation and what affect it might have on the labor market. Automation , I believe, is something a lot of people have been taught to be paranoid about as it relates to work, but contrary to what I expected, a lot of Dr. Shierholz points contested this cultural paranoia and claimed that automation isn’t really going to be any bigger of a deal in the near future than it has been already.
She evaluated one of the most common narratives of robots replacing human labor which is the image of the trucking industry being replaced with self-driving vehicles. She stated that it was unrealistic for the trucking industry to automatically overhaul and automate completely when so much revenue has already been spent on the already existing trucks which work perfectly fine. From a rational economic standpoint it doesn’t make sense for the industry to completely overhaul itself and for these same reasons automation across most industries is likely to be gradual.
I was surprised to find out that we were actually at record lows in technological innovation, probably because the media is constantly bombarding us with futuristic ideals. I realized that if we are at record lows in terms of technological innovation, then I probably don’t have a good image of what a technological revolution looks like even though I felt as if I did.
Even if automation was argued to not be much of a concern, Dr. Shierholz did enlighten me to other possible concerns. I hadn’t known that up until the past few decades wages and productivity rose together in a linear fashion, and now even though productivity has risen significantly, wages have flat-lined. The graph was a bit disheartening to see and then the realization that all of the increased revenue as a result of that productivity was going to the top 10 percent but most of all the top 1 percent was a shock. Since I’m not well versed in economic theory, it made me wonder whether or not this is to be expected and what are the implications of this sort of situation on a broad scale.
Automation, I suppose, will continue to increase productivity, but who is entitled to those increased economic gains?
