Are robots competing for your job?
Probably, but don’t count yourself out.
The New Yorker magazine has a great essay by Jill Lepore about whether Are Robots Competing for Your Job? (Feb. 25, 2019) The essay talks about the various predictions, including the prediction that R.I. (Remote Intelligence or global workers) will take your job too. The fear of robots is the other side of the coin of the fear of immigrants which raises questions about why we are panicking over jobs when unemployment is so low.
Misery likes a scapegoat: heads, blame machines; tails, foreigners. But is the present alarm warranted? Panic is not evidence of danger; it’s evidence of panic. Stoking fear of invading robots and of invading immigrants has been going on for a long time, and the predictions of disaster have, generally, been bananas. Oh, but this time it’s different, the robotomizers insist.
Lepore points out how many job categories have been lost only to be replaced by others which is why economists are apparently dismissive of the anxiety.
Some questions we should be asking include:
- Who benefits from all these warnings about job loss?
- How do these warnings function rhetorically? What else might they be saying? How are they interpretations of the past by futurists?
- How is the panic about job losses tied to worries about immigration?