Technology has surpassed the thin line between humans working as the leading labor force and robots performing the same tasks in several industries today. A lot of the repetitive tasks are very well being done by machinery that hardly ever errs, or gets tired or asks for increased wages. It’s good for business and easier for mass production and humans can very well perform at places where a non-linear creativity is needed.
The change has multiplied in pace over the past years. From manufacturing industry to packaging, from digging a hole to 3d printing, where a certain task required dozens of men earlier, it started being able to be done by a machine and governed by one (and the employment vs machine debate was ever so consuming for all of us); however, technology has come to the point that even that one man isn’t a necessity anymore.
Tesla’s self-driven car is extremely precise, at times safer than a human driving one and is definitely a game-changer. Uber is clearly thinking of self-driven cab service. But where the former was to eradicate people driving their cars (not a big bump on employment), the latter is definitely going to leave a huge number of people unhappy. Self-driven taxis, the billing is always haggle-free, the drivers never have moods, the cars know exactly where the traffic might be heavy and take a better route, and everybody is always on-time.. who wouldn’t want that?
But it’s not just that these jobs are going to be quenched. Tesla’s self-driving truck is going to be the nightmare to logistics industry that electronic media was to the print one. Imagine, hundreds of people unemployed in a jiffy. They’re not gonna find jobs overnight, even if trying to get training for other jobs, it’s going to be quite an issue.
The government might have to facilitate this with some scheme, perhaps introduce new industries fit for less trained people, perhaps allocate resources evenly in different training institutes while providing stipends to the affectees, or perhaps just ask them to wait for change that might never come. The government might need more tax money to do most of these things, (of course promises are free, so that’s one way out), but more tax will be harder to collect from an economy with a large newly unemployed chunk of people. And even if the promises premise is undertaken, it hardly ever ends up in a nice way.