Ben Casselman put it bluntly in his article “Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back.”
“Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.”
Artificial intelligence won’t just put blue collar workers out of work. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance in Japan replaced a whole department of 34 insurance workers with technology called IBM Watson. The company predicts the computer will increase productivity by 30%. One study predicts that “nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.”
In his book Rise of the Robots, author Martin Ford fears that humanity faces a bleak future. Unlike in previous economic revolutions, Ford believes that technology will ultimately destroy many more jobs than it will create putting millions of people out of work.
“Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.”
