Automation, technological employment, and society - A review Available to Purchase

Humanity is faced with the prospect of technological employment becoming a reality sooner or later. The problem of technological unemployment means that humanity’s technological progress in discoveringmeans to economize usage of human labor (or effort) would outpace the discovery of means to deploy the displaced labor implying that a lot of the human population would find itself unemployed. The Autor, Levy, and Murnane (ALM) hypothesis postulate that In routine tasks (both manual and cognitive), technology will replace personal activity; however, it in no way can replace individual labor in non-daily jobs. (Be they manual or cognitive). For a while, it seemed that humanity could take comfort in the ALM hypothesis. However, from the developments in the recent past, it is becoming evident that technology could substitute humans in even non-routine tasks (be they manual or cognitive). The future of occupations cannot be predicted with certainty. Some economists and social scientists predict dire circumstances with most jobs vanishing in the future. In contrast, others offer an optimistic view that things might not be as dire as some predict. In the event of large-scale technological unemployment, two societal problems, one of income redistribution and two of productive use of the abundant leisure time, would emerge.