Monday, September 08, 2014

March of the machines …

… Bryan Appleyard — Ludd: The Once and Future King. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Meanwhile in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote a very neo-Luddite column that questioned the consoling belief that education would somehow solve the probem of the destruction of jobs by technology. “Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labour is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.”
Of course, Krugman was once a paid booster of Enron. A robot might be an improvement over him. The problem, it seems to me, is that if everything gets made by machines, who gets paid to buy anything?

No comments:

Post a Comment