Those of you who work in a large organization occasionally might find yourself shaking your head thinking about a colleague: “What do they do all day?” Some of you might even think that about yourselves. Or you might think that about people in another department, especially those with whom you have an adversarial relationship.
At the same time, you also might be uncomfortable with the automation of certain tasks and possibly seeing those jobs disappear. Even those jobs of the unproductive humans you shook your head at. Fear of job automation and its unintended consequences has people thinking, but what are the roots of this thought?
Isn’t the history of technology about removing humans from a task and replacing them with machines, even simple ones?
Here’s an example from Vaclav Smil’s book Energy in World History.
Do you really want to be a glass polisher? And do the unintended consequences of job automation include creating shoplifters?