Name: Technological Progress and Automation Anxiety with Carl Frey
Uploaded: 2020-12-05T19:15:56.000Z
Duration: 6 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Oh, technology has progressed enormously over the past 200 years, but the debate surrounding its effects has not.

And we are now living through another period off automation and anxiety, and this is something that has featured in various points in history.

Back in 1929 for example, The New York Times published this article on the fate off the Lamplighter.

So since the 15 hundreds, lamp lighters had been in occupation that featured in most neighborhoods and was an institution alongside the local police Onda post office.

But with the electrification off city lights, they were threatened on lamp lighters disappeared over a matter off just a few decades now.

Even the lamp lighters mostly willingly agreed that electrification off light had its virtues.

But that didn't keep them from resisting a threat to their jobs.

There's been a tendency to ridicule people that resists new technologies.

And when I was an undergrad in economic history and I was told that the very last thing we should worry about is machinery and technology taking people's jobs because economic growth was stagnant for millennia and only actually took off with the first machine age with the introduction off machinery in production that allowed us to produce much more with fewer people.

Now that is not to suggest that economic activity was completely stagnant prior to them, and there was a lot off inventions before then.

But there were very few machines that actually were used and in production.

And it is indeed those machines that allowed us to produce more with fewer people on.

As a result of that, people are roughly 40 times richer today, adjusted for inflation.

Now you might ask, How much does it does it make sense even to compare incomes in 17 50 with incomes today?

Because the consumer baskets that you can purchase for income is very different today than it waas back then.

So people during the early days of the Industrial Revolution can only look after the lives of the wealthy in envy, who had servants to do the most tedious things for them.

Today, all of us here have access to the electric servant in terms of dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and so on that relieve us off a lot off tedious work, not to mention antibiotics and automobiles, and indeed, technology has had a tremendous equalizing effect in terms of our consumption possibilities as well.

And if that wasn't enough evidence of progress, consider the fact that earning those higher incomes and producing those new goods and services has become much more comfortable.

A swell At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people working coal mines they didn't see daylight.

Cave ins and explosions were part of everyday working life, long to see something.

Today, the majority off us work in air conditioned offices.

I think the hardest day in recent memory at Oxford Martin School was when the coffee machine broke down.

And I think, you know, you need to put things in perspective.

So I think the long run story off mechanization is clearly one that has benefited.

Or so Unfortunately, I think it's also only half of the story.

The industrial Revolution is essentially what laid the foundations for the modern world, and I think it's interesting just to take a step back and think about what people actually said and thought at the time.

So Benjamin Disraeli, for example, before he became prime minister of Britain published a novel called Corning's Be in 18 48 in which one character remarks that I see cities, people with machines.

Certainly Manchester must be the most wonderful place off modern times.

The very same year Frederick Engels publish his conditions of the working classes in England, which was written during a stay in Precisely Manchester on Angles had a very different take on the matter.

He argued that machinery only subject downgrade people take people's jobs and puts downward pressure on workers wages.

Now we all know that he waas wrong about the future.

But it was actually fairly on target about the period, he observed, because even as the British economy took off, wages were stagnant and probably even falling at the lower end off the income distribution.

The future off technological progress and economic growth actually depends a lot on what people believe, and if people think that they're going to benefit from this off the short medium, long term people are likely to willingly accept automation, but if they don't think so, they're much more likely to resist it.

And one of the key points is that the reason that the first industrial revolution actually happened in Britain, Waas that for the first time in Britain, governments actually sided with innovators and pioneers off industry rather than angry workmen.

 The craft guilds, which persisted all across Europe up until the 19th century, had no interest in any machinery being implemented that threatened their skills and incomes and fearing social unrest, government typically sided with the guilt. 