In the midst of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution, bands of English textile workers destroyed machines, believing they were evil and would take their jobs and cause misery.
These protesters were the Luddites and they were right, says John Thornill, innovation editor at the Financial Times, in a review of Carl Benedikt Frey’s book, “The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour, and Power in the Age of Automation“.
The same sentiments are being expressed once again as the tech revolution gathers pace across the world, causing concerns that the technology trap will turn into a rerun of the Industrial Revolution.
A 2013 paper estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs were at risk of being wiped out by automation because of the impact of artificial intelligence. This is similar to the Industrial Revolution wiping out jobs in the coal mines.
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It is no wonder the digital revolution is also referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It has revolutionized how we communicate, collect, use and distribute knowledge.
And just like the Industrial Revolution, the tech revolution is expected to eventually be labor-enabling by creating jobs in sectors and areas that previously never existed or were small, such as the rise in the gig economy in recent years.
It will also lead to better-paying jobs, Thornill said in his review of Frey’s provocative book.
But before that happens there will be a lot of jobs lost. This happened during the earlier decades of the Industrial Revolution when it was mostly labor-replacing.
This is expected to put the middle class under threat and create a social distortion. “We are now living through another period of worker-replacing technology,” Frey wrote.
