Engineering and The Disappearance of Jobs

One of the key issues facing engineers this century will be a relatively simple question.  Will engineers be the eaten or eaters in the job-eating maw of technology?  From lawyers to radiologists to software designers, the middle-class historically was based on the assumptions of a college degree combined with flexibility, creativity, and a continually upgraded skill set.  This appears to be an assumption that is no longer valid.

Technology traditionally has been an effective partner with the middle class.  The world of MS Excel and Word made the global economic system cheaper, faster, and better.  Excel never had the goal of complete labor replacement.  But as Martin Ford points out in the one of most important books to come out in years, Rise of Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, the goals of cheaper, faster, and better are rapidly shifting to the goal of complete replacement.

From a review of the book by Barbara Ehrenreich in the New York Times Book Review yesterday:

"Ford offers little hope that emerging technologies will eventually generate new forms of employment, in ways that blacksmiths yielded to automakers in the early 20th century.  He predicts that new industries will "rarely, if ever be highly labor-intensive," pointing to companies like YouTube and Instagram, which are characterized by "tiny workforces and huge valuations and revenues."  On another front, 3-D printing is poised to make a mockery of manufacturing as we knew it.  Truck driving may survive for a while - at least until self-driving vehicles start rolling out of Detroit or, perhaps, San Jose.

The disappearance of jobs has not ushered in a new age of leisure, as social theorists predicted uneasily in the 1950s.  Would the masses utilize their freedom from labor in productive ways, such as civic participation and the arts, or would they die of boredom in their ranch houses?  Somehow, it was usually assumed, they would still manage to eat."