New reports suggest that robots are changing our economic reality and taking millions of American’s jobs. But some politicians continue to believe that there’s still a way to provide enough jobs for everyone.
But it doesn’t seem like this will be the case. Recently, Changying Precision Technology Co. in China replaced a good majority of their workers with machines. The company’s productivity increased by 250 percent and the number of product defects fell by 80 percent. Although this is great news for the company, it’s not so great for the workers who lost their jobs.
In a world that’s moving toward innovation and better efficiency, the replacement of people with machines is likely to become a regular trend. In fact, the White House even released a report in December stating that 83 percent of jobs in the United States where people make less than $20 per hour are likely to become automated if they aren’t already.
People may not even need to drive for themselves in the near future, which leaves bus drivers, truck drivers, and even Uber drivers without an income.
Andrew Yang, who is the founder and CEO of Venture for America, recently published an article citing the White House’s report. He warns Americans to get ready for a period of nearly 60 percent unemployment, saying even the smartest people in the world believe that an abundance of jobs will be lost as technology progresses.
But many worry that Trump and his administration are not taking this seriously. In fact, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is even on record saying that machines are not going to take people’s jobs anytime soon.
But Greg Creed believes it will happen much sooner than Mnuchin realizes. He believes that by the mid to late ’20s, we will start to see machines replacing workers in low paying jobs.
This problem could potentially be alleviated if Americans were given an education that allowed them to do things a machine cannot. Therefore, it would be smart for politicians to focus on lowering the astronomical cost of higher education and looking into this problem more thoroughly.