Fodder for Essay--BOTS V/S JOBS--the hindu

ROBOTS V/S JOBS—ESSAY FODDER—the hindu

The restaurant chain Chili's installed 45,000 computer tablets in its U.S. locations, says The Washington Post . The tablets enable customers to pay their bills, play games and place some orders.

One hotel is introducing a robot bellhop that delivers items to guests’ rooms, reports The New York Times . The same story mentions automated golf caddies. Another Times story reports that the German firm Daimler has demonstrated a self-driving truck.

Lowe’s, the hardware chain, is testing a robot that greets customers and directs them to the correct aisle for purchases, says The Wall Street Journal .

 Could a robot write this column? It seems plausible. Some might even regard that as an improvement.

It's easy to see why. Competing with a robot can be futile. Consider a robot costing $25,000. Unlike the $25,000 worker, the robot’s expense is one-time; it can work 24 hours a day, and there’s no health insurance.

TECHNOLOGY CREATES NEW JOBS NOT DESTROY THEM !

One reason is that new technologies typically involve lower prices, superior value or both. This creates a huge demand. Take airlines. After World War II, railroads still dominated intercity travel. But airlines’ greater speed and increasing size, especially after the advent of jets in the late 1950s, made trains uneconomic. Adjusted for inflation, airfares declined. While rail travel collapsed, the number of annual airline passengers rose from 19 million in 1950 to 737 million in 2012. In 2014, the industry employed 5, 89,000 full- and part-time workers.

The same logic applies now. Someone has to design, program, service and coordinate the robots and other digitised processes. Job creation is inevitable.

Jobs also survive in sectors that seem largely immune to digitisation — “whether it is taking care of the young or taking care of the old, or repairing a lot that needs to be repaired,” as ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently put it. Human contact is wanted or needed in places where it seems obsolete. Logically, ATMs should have decimated bank tellers. In reality, the number of tellers (about 6, 00,000) is slightly above its 1990 level, notes Taylor, citing a study by James Bessen of Boston University law school.

THE FEAR IS EXAGGERATED!

The fear of technological job loss is real but, I suspect, exaggerated, because it occurs after a period when deep employment losses for other reasons — the financial crisis and Great Recession — have made people extra sensitive to any threat to their livelihoods. In this climate, the spectre of hordes of job-destroying robots seems realistic. History suggests scepticism; strong job creation (11.5 million since 2010) is a real-world rebuttal.

But also temper the scepticism. The fact that new jobs have always replaced the old is an aggregate phenomenon. It does not shield all individuals. Waves of technological advances have always left losers — people whose factories moved or shut; or whose skills became obsolete; or whose firms succumbed to new competition. Often, the new jobs aren’t where the old ones were and aren’t suitable for their workers.

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