By BERNARD CONDON and PAUL WISEMAN
Associated Press - Jan. 23, 2013
NEW YORK (AP) — Five years after the start of the Great Recession,
the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been
lost in developed countries the world over.
And the situation is even worse than it appears.
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to
vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What's more,
these jobs aren't just being lost to China and other developing
countries, and they aren't just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are
disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
They're being obliterated by technology.
Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of
other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and
capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done.
For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be
architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an
Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: First in a three-part series on the loss of
middle-class jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, and the role of
technology.
___
"The jobs that are going away aren't coming back," says Andrew
McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of "Race
Against the Machine." ''I have never seen a period where computers
demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past
seven years."
The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and
analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet
computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they're on
the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let
businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing
expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment
categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are starting to
disappear.
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