I have just witnessed a lecture that Andrew McAfee
has given about how the gap between the number of potential employees and the
number of jobs is growing bigger and bigger. You can blame a part of this on
the recession, but according to Andrew the new technologies plays a huge part of
why the number of jobs do not reach its full potential. The importance of the
technological development can be seen when taking a look at how the world
population and the social development index have increased over time. The past
200 years has been historical in the sense of population growth and the
increase of GDP in the world. The technological development is of course the
source of this. The fact that the droids are taking our jobs is however not
something that should make as angry or afraid, the point that Andrew is trying
to make is that this decreasing need for employees will create extra time for
us to make the world a better place to live in.
This entire story reminds me of the futuristic
cartoon series “The Jetsons”. In this cartoon the husband George only has one
job; to press a button to get the working robots going. After pressing this
button he calls it a day and can go home and rest after a hard day´s work. The
question is if we are not moving towards this “Jetsons”-future in a rapid pace.
I have previously worked as an auditor, and I know for sure that the
IT-development the past 20 years have made my work a lot easier. I started to
work only 4 years ago, and by then all bookkeeping had been digitalized, which
made it easier for us to track the financial transactions. The seniors at my job
told me about how it was when they first started to work as auditors. Back then
they had to look into actual books in order to track the transactions, which
took a lot of time. In this example you can tell the technology has managed to
reduce the need of work force working with both bookkeeping and auditing. However,
in the future I do not see it as impossible that the computers have taken over
ALL of the jobs, that all of the bookkeeping is made automatically by every
transaction made. In this case the future auditor will just be one engineer
controlling the robot which is keeping track of the financial transactions.
I do not know if the technology will development
will increase in the same speed as in recent years, however it might do. And if
it does, then we will probably look into a future with much spare time on our
hands, for better and for worse.
References
[1] Andrew Mcafee, "Are Androids taking our jobs?"
http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs
Retrieved: 2014-03-19
