On Automation and Technological Unemployment

A lot of people think that automation has increased employment and cite the industrial revolution as proof of that. Those people pretty much always thinks this because the total number of jobs in society has increased. While it's true that the total number of jobs has increased over  time, it's completely and utterly false that that increase is due to  automation. That increase is due to population growth. The more people  there are, the more jobs there will be. To examine the effects of  automation, you need to look at the number of jobs relative to the the  size of the population. Even without any technological progress, an  increase in population will require an increase in total jobs to meet  the increased demands of that increased population. To attribute that  increase in jobs to automation is completely illogical.

Look at ATMs. Despite the number of ATMs increasing, the number of  bank tellers has also increased. When you look at the actual numbers  though and compare them to population growth, you see that the number of  bank tellers has increased nowhere near as much as it should have if  ATMs were not introduced. That difference in the number of bank tellers  is jobs that have have been lost due to ATMs.

The June 2017 estimate for the number of people working in the UK was 31.95 million people and the UK population is estimated to be 65.493 million. That means that 48.78% of the UK population is currently employed. From this article(pdf):

"If the conventional assumption that about 75 percent of the  population in pre-industrial society was employed in agriculture is  adopted for medieval England then output per worker grew by even more  (see, for example, Allen (2000), p.11)."

Clearly then, the percentage of the employed population has decreased  significantly from before the industrial revolution and that is  obviously due to technological progress.

Before the industrial revolution, it was common for people to work  from childhood to grave. After the industrial revolution poverty and  unemployment went through the roof and one of the ways that was reduced  was by removing the young, sick, disabled and the elderly from the  workforce through compulsory education and welfare benefits. This is why  we have figures like 5% unemployment today. That's due to automation  increasing productivity and thereby decreasing the percentage of the  population required to work in order to meet the demands of society  while simultaneously making society more wealthier. Without that  increase in productivity from automation, those groups would still be  required to work like everyone else. Society's demands are still being  met despite those groups no longer working. Their labour is no longer  required because technological progress has increased the productivity  of workers.

As the evidence clearly shows, technological progress reduces the  percentage of the population required to work in order to meet the  demands of society. Furthermore, the evidence also shows that  technological progress is accelerating. That means that the rate at  which employment is being reduced is also accelerating. It took  thousands of years to to reduce employment to 75%, it took a couple more  centuries to reduce employment to 50% and it's estimated that it will  take a couple more decades to reduce employment to 25% of the  population.