For the past century, workers have worried that machines would take their jobs: assembly line robots would replace factory workers, and mechanical harvesters would end field worker jobs. Recent media coverage of technology advances have many white collar workers worried that they, too, can be replaced in this way. Are these advances going to usher in a new era of leisure, allowing people to focus on things that matter more, or do they threaten already scarce positions?
Enterprising Silicon Valley companies have designed software that can now go through millions of documents for legal cases in a fraction of the time, with greater accuracy, and for less than one-tenth of the cost of hiring lawyers and paralegals to evaluate this information. Computers are now sophisticated enough to engage in a kind of simple deductive reasoning and understanding of language and style that was previously too complicated for anyone other than human beings to do. Of course, a person is still needed to read and follow up on information that is winnowed by a computer, but you need far fewer hours of labor, and people, with the computer completing an initial elimination of irrelevant data.
Academic economist and New York Times writer Paul Krugman interprets these developments to mean that college-educated workers will become less needed in the coming years. He says that middle-class jobs will not grow even if we provide better education for our children, and that we will need to make a dedicated commitment to ensuring fair wages through negotiation and policy if we are to preserve this social class as a way of life.
In any case, technological advances have significant implications for our labor force.
