How Job Crapification Works

I've written before about the tendency for technology to result in lower-paying jobs. Job deskilling was a major factor in the first industrial revolution (when skilled artisans were displaced into menial, repetitive factory jobs) and is just as important in today's Technological Revolution, which began sometime in the late 1970s with the widespread availability of computer chips. 

I've written about this trend quite a few times before:

• If You Teach a Robot to Fish
•  The Technological Roots of Income Inequality
• The Internet Has Killed Prosperity as We Know It 
• The Driverless Economy
• Why the Super-Rich Get Richer

In a macroeconomic sense, it all sounds quite theoretical, but the following photograph provides a great real-world case study of how, exactly, deskilling works:

The Tiger Stone Paving Machine, sometimes called the road-printer, can lay down a lovely, herringboned brick road or walkway at 4 to 5 times the speed of a crew of skilled bricklayers. The machine is available in 13, 16, and 20-ft widths and costs from $81,485 to $108,655. And best of all (for buyers), it requires no skilled bricklayers. Oh sure, you still need human attendants to feed bricks into the "pusher slot." But they obviously don't have to be highly skilled artisans.



So this might seem like a pretty small incursion of technology into the lives of a few bricklayers (and who cares about bricklayers, right? I mean, we're so beyond bricklaying; I'm being sarcastic, of course), but this is just one example of a trend that plays out in a million different ways across the economy every day. New tech shows up; jobs get a little dumber, require a few less skills. Wages go down. Productivity jumps. Profits increase. Wealth gets transferred, from workers to owners.

Repeat until systemic collapse.

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A big thank-you to all the great people who retweeted me yesterday: 





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