Chapter 10: Work and Wealth

Automation leads to the destruction of jobs and can harm the workforce, similar to what we see in the movie. The automation of "noncreative jobs," such as secretary/clerical and factory positions, are very susceptible to being replaced by automated processes, such as those we see in the film [3, 5]. In the film specifically, we see the job of sanding a car hood automated by a robot. This system was chosen for many reasons, some of which were the greater efficiency of the robot compared to a human and the lower cost of operation. 


While the movie displays a fictional scenario, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Since 2000, approximately 1.7 million jobs have been lost due to the automation of the work being done [1]. In the car industry, for example, the U.S. car manufacturing industry has 1,457 robots for every 10,000 human employees [4]. Furthermore, it's estimated that up to 375 million jobs could be displaced/replaced by automated processes by the year 2030, many of which are blue-collar jobs such as manufacturing and routine physical labor. [1]


It is worth mentioning that automation in the current climate of the economy seems to be transforming jobs instead of outright destroying them, somewhat mitigating the jobs lost by creating new ones. For example, "In the United States, approximately 33% of recently created jobs are in occupations that were not existent 25 years ago." [2]. However, these types of jobs also tend to require different skill sets than the jobs being replaced, which could lead to complex retraining of employees to better suit the jobs they're being transferred into. [2] 

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