Modern Technology & Employment (Part V)

Why there was serious, persistent and growing unemployment?

Rifkin, in a recent interview while he was attending an international workshop on the Global Economy held in San Francisco, as president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends and author of several best-selling books on environment and society, including Entropy and Biosphere politics, attempted to answer the question why there was serious, persistent and growing unemployment in the industrial countries, although productivity and output had been rising. Rifkin found that this de linking of jobs from economic growth could be explained by the fast expansion of information technology in both the industrial and service sectors. And in the near future the livelihoods of millions of farmers, particularly in the south, will be threatened by tissue culture and genetic engineering that can produce foods and fibers in the laboratory.

Modern Technology & Employment (Part IV)

The End of Work

There are, however, quite a few thinkers who predict that rapid technological developments generally lead to unprecedented job retrenchments worldwide, and the resulting unemployment crisis is structural in nature and may get increasingly worse in the foreseeable future.

This the grim scenario portrayed by the renowned American author and social analyst Jeremy Rifkin, whose forthcoming book ‘The End of Work’ will show how computerization, automation and biotechnology have already begun to eliminate millions of jobs. Within a few decades, predicts Rifkin, hundreds of millions of people working in manufacturing, services and agriculture could be displaced, potentially causing massive social upheavals in the industrial and Third World countries.

We are fast moving into a world where there will be factories without workers and agricultural production without farms or farmers, said Rifkin. Much of the global work force could well be eliminated, replaced by information technology, robots, machines and biotechnology.