There’s a very human fear of technology ruining our lives.
“It’ll replace us,” we say, when a new-fangled bit of technology comes along. But is there any real truth behind that anxiety?
It’s our instinctive reaction. But that doesn’t make it the right one.
When I was young, I can still recall a (serious) news report, commenting – with furrowed brows – how, shock horror, some children as young as 8 “had access to the internet.”
That was it. It wasn’t that they were doing something wrong, or even that they were unsupervised. It was the fear that they were using new technology. I posted a great video here a while ago featuring the founder of Wired Magazine, who says that in the early/mid 90s, mainstream newspapers were still writing articles about the web as “The Internet – Threat or Menace?” and, though that precise type of hysteria about the web has died down, general fear-peddling about new advances hasn’t ceased at all.
The truth this, technological change is part of an observed phenomenon I’ve written about before: “creative destruction”.
In my great-grandparents day, there used to be someone who’d ride down the road on a horse and cart, selling blocks of ice, so the local housewives throughout the city could preserve meat and other things for longer. Eventually a bunch of clever American and Japanese people came up with an electrical device called a refrigerator, which has become a feature of pretty much every house everywhere.
Now the ice-block salesman’s job has gone. Indeed, so has the job of the people who made the ice. But seriously, are we worse off because of it? Furthermore, are they? Did those people who found themselves out of work lose out long term?
In the short term it must have been hard, but surely with their expertise in the freezing business, they were well-placed to sell and support those buying the new appliances. And today: well, those people are long gone, and their descendants are just like the rest of us – with better jobs, better (inflation-adjusted) wages, more buying power, higher standards of living, and even more leisure time than their great-grandparents could have dreamed of.
The smart and thoughtful Roger Bootle has raised some interesting points related to robots and artificial intelligence in the workforce. His article in the telegraph, though too negative for my money, is nonetheless well worth a read.
We can’t begin to imagine the hardship of living in an early hunter-gatherer society. Where the life expectancy is around 25, things were, to put it mildly, pretty hard. The agricultural revolution must have rendered thousands of hunter-gatherer “jobs” redundant. But everything got better. The industrial revolution must have rendered millions of agricultural jobs redundant. But everything got better.
This technological revolution is, well, yes, rendering many jobs redundant. But the wisest among us shouldn’t worry too much about it. I’ve been made redundant. It’s an awful feeling. But for those of us who do find themselves out of work, the stats show that it virtually always leads to better things. And the world gets more efficient, and the standard of living of the people globally continues to rise.
In the land of the free, disruption is king. Long may it last.
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Andy Jones Online 