English to Greek Other Management big data, technology, business

In fairness, technology has always been creating jobs, and it has always been destroying jobs. Go back to 1800 when on the order of 90 percent of Americans worked on farms. Now it’s less than 2 percent. Of course, all those people didn’t just become unemployed. As technology automated threshing, those jobs were replaced by new jobs. Henry Ford helped create the auto industry. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many others helped create the computer industry, and numerous other occupations rose up that we never could have thought of before. And so people moved from one area to another.

You’d like to see that happening again now. But the data show that it just isn’t happening as fast. We’re having the automation and the job destruction; we’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.

That said, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, because ultimately the purpose of economic progress and technological progress is to be able to create more wealth with less work. I mean, isn’t that what we want? More wealth with less work? So, if we are in ***a Star-Trek economy***, where replicators create all the essentials that we need, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we can have an economic system that matches to it and find a way that people can share in that benefit. And people can still continue to find meaning and value in life.