(Thomas Mitchell, 4TH ST8 ) – In the “Terminator” movies the machines via Skynet take over and try to exterminate the extraneous human race.
But what if the machines take over in a different way, and merely exterminate the need for some humans just as the automobile eliminated the jobs of buggy whip makers.
That is a premise being posited by The Daily Caller’s Christopher Bedford, who ticks off a number of jobs disappearing due to technology. The automobile assembly line is being automated — more cars rolling out with fewer workers. And more and more of those cars and trucks and buses will someday be self-driving. Uber and Tesla are working on it. McDonald’s plans to install automated ordering machines in all its outlets. Why not burgerbots?
In today’s Las Vegas newspaper, a Bloomberg columnist says America can forget about Trump bringing those iPhone jobs to the U.S. After first citing the hundreds of thousands of “skilled” workers needed to manufacture iPhones and noting U.S. workers don’t have those skills, the writer concludes all those tedious, low-paid jobs are becoming increasingly obsolete as industrial robots improve.
Resistance is futile. It did not work for the Luddites. It will not work for the low-skilled workers, who, as Bedford notes, have not seen wages grow in decades.
Mr. Mitchell publishes the 4TH ST8 Blog.
Column originally appears at 4TH ST8.
