Talk:Technological unemployment

Data is not measured in man-hours"

"During World War II, Alan Turing's Bombe machine compressed and decoded thousands of man-years worth of encrypted data in a matter of hours."

This sentence quantifies data in "man-years", which does not make sense. It seems to conflate the processing of data (which is measured roughly in instructions per second (IPS) or floating point operations per second (FLOPS)) with the amount of data operated upon. Also, it mentions that the data is "compressed"- but the Bombe page on Wikipedia does not mention "compression" at all.

In other words, the sentence is saying that your cell phone data plan offers you 5 man-years' worth of data, when it means to say that your cell phone processor performs billions of operations per second. Also, is there a concrete reference for this? The Bombe was fairly slow in terms of raw computational ability, and to confidently claim that the computer replaced thousands of man-hours' worth of work means we need some idea of how long it would have taken a human to perform the equivalent computations, so that we can infer "time spent computing" from "number of instructions". At the very least, this claim is unsupported from the Wikipedia page on the Bombe itself.

Direct relationship

The following is a paraphrasing of statements from "Mechanization in Industry" Jerome (1934):

Direct effect: Automation displaces workers, increasing unemployment

How much cost is lowered by automation depends on how much of the savings is passed on to the customer.

Whether or not lowered costs creates sufficient demand to maintain or increase growth depends on the elasticity of the product."

Summarized:

If: The industry that is being automated grows fast enough

Then: The industry will hire enough workers to keep employment stable or may even increase employment.

Otherwise: displaced workers have to find work in another industry and, depending on their job skills, may be "structurally unemployed" and require a long time to find work.

Definition of automation needed

Automation has had several meanings over the years. It has been applied to mechanization, where workers became operators of machines. But a more usual definition is that automation takes over some function.

The first glass bottle blowing machines of ca. 1890 were I assume what were called "manual" or worked by an operator. Around 1900 automatic glass bottle machines were developed.

In process control, it may mean an individual controller holding a set point, or a whole process that is operated by "remote control" from a central control room.

Computer control of processes is a means of replacing individual old style pneumatic, hydraulic or electronic (known as analog) controls with a computer or "digital" control. It was not so much an increase in automation as it was a consolidation of functions. Digital control is superior and allows keeping process data for analysis, but it was hardly as revolutionary as the original analog control.

Machine tools were make "self acting" in the 1840s b Nasmyth in response to a strike and other labor problems. The self acting machine replaced most of the workers.

Decline in hours worked

In 1900 the work week was about 50 hours. Today it averages about 34.

In 1900, fewer than 10% of the children graduated from high school. Most went to work in their early teens. College education was rare. Elderly people worked as long as they were able.

If we tried to put all those segments (secondary school students, elderly) back in the labor force, unemployment would be much higher. We simply do not need the labor because all work is now done by machines.

Contrary to popular belief, education did not necessarily create economic growth. It prevented unemployment. The Owens glass bottle machine was said to have done more to reduce child labor than the child labor laws. (Skilled glassblowers earned $6/day, among the highest pay of any skilled labor. Therefore they were supplied with young boys as assistants.)