By: New York Times
April 25, 2017
Two hundred years ago, the Luddites rebelled against weaving technology. In 1964, US President Lyndon B. Johnson received “The Triple Revolution” memo that laid out the threat of job displacement due to automation.
We’ve been concerned about technology displacing humans for a long time, says futurist Martin Ford. And that’s had a strange effect on us. “Because of the false alarms, it’s led to a very conventional way of thinking,” he says. “That, yes, technology may devastate entire industries and wipe out entire types of work — but at the same time, progress is going to lead to entirely new things. New industries will arise.”
Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, isn’t so sure. He can think of one class of workers whose livelihoods were completely decimated by technology, without any new opportunities. “These workers, of course,” he says, “were horses.”