Social issues of automation

Automation raises several important social issues. Among them is automation's impact on employment. Indeed, the Luddites were a social movement of English textile workers in the early 1800s who protested against Jacquard's automated weaving looms— often by destroying such textile machines— that they felt threatened their jobs. Since then, the term luddite has come to be applied freely to anyone who is against any advance of technology.

Some argue automation leads to higher employment. One author made the following case. When automation was first introduced, it caused widespread fear. It was thought that the displacement of human workers by computerized systems would lead to severe unemployment. In fact, the opposite has often been true, e.g., the freeing up of the labor force allowed more people to enter higher skilled jobs, which are typically higher paying. One odd side effect of this shift is that "unskilled labor" now benefits in many "First-world" nations, because fewer people are available to fill such jobs.

Some, such as technocrats, argue the reverse, at least in the long term. They argue that automation has only just begun and short-term conditions might partially obscure its long-term impact. Many manufacturing jobs left the United States during the early 1990s, but a one-time massive increase in IT jobs (which are only now being outsourced), at the same time, offset this.

It appears that automation does devalue labor through its replacement with less-expensive machines; however, the overall effect of this on the workforce as a whole remains unclear. Today automation of the workforce is quite advanced, and continues to advance increasingly more rapidly throughout the world and is encroaching on ever more skilled jobs, yet during the same period the general well-being of most people in the world (where political factors have not muddied the picture) has increased dramatically. What role automation has played in these changes has not been well studied.

One irony is that in recent years, outsourcing has been blamed for the loss of jobs in which automation is the more likely culprit. This argument is supported by the fact that in the U.S., the number of insourced jobs is increasing at a greater rate than those outsourced. Further, the rate of decline in U.S. manufacturing employment is no greater than the worldwide average: 11 percent between 1995 and 2002. In the same period, China, which has been frequently criticized for "stealing" American manufacturing jobs, lost 15 million manufacturing jobs of its own (about 15% of its total), compared with 2 million lost in the U.S.

Millions of human telephone operators and answerers, throughout the world, have been replaced wholly (or almost wholly) by automated telephone switchboards and answering machines (not by Indian or Chinese workers). Thousands of medical personnel have been replaced in many medical tasks from 'primary' screeners in electrocardiography or radiography, to laboratory analyses of human genes, sera, cells, and tissues by automated systems. Even physicians have been partly replaced by remote, automated robots and by highly sophisticated surgical robots that allow them to perform remotely and at levels of accuracy and precision otherwise not normally possible for the average physician.