At the end of last year, Amazon unveiled, “Amazon Go,” a futuristic, fully-automated convenience store set to open its doors in Seattle, Washington, within the next few months. While this exciting new venture promises to make quick-stop shopping trips easier for busy consumers, critics are wary of this type of advanced automation, and fear its widespread use could jeopardize a vast amount of jobs.

Amazon Go is a truly unique shopping experience free of lines, registers, and checkouts of any kind. Instead, the store utilizes its customers’ smartphones and “grab and go technology,” which allows the consumer to simply walk in, grab desired items, and then get on with the rest of their day.

However, since this modern convenience store does not require human employees, labor activists fear the negative implications Amazon Go could potentially have on employment rates, especially if more companies begin moving toward automation.

These concerns in regards to employment are not necessarily unwarranted, nor are they specific to our modern world. In fact, mankind actually has a long track record of fearing mechanical progress and blaming it for high unemployment rates throughout history.

During the Industrial Revolution, many workers resented mechanical innovation, believing it would result in mass unemployment across sectors which traditionally relied on manual labor. In the stocking industry, for example, fear of machines was so intense, massive riots erupted as soon as workers were introduced to the new mechanical knitting machines known as, “stocking frames.” In the midst of all the chaos, new machines were destroyed, houses were burned, inventors were threatened, and peace was not restored until the military eventually intervened.

Unfortunately, the stocking industry example is not an isolated instance of machines causing mass hysteria over employment concerns. In fact, similar outrage was experienced across the globe throughout the entire Industrial Revolution. In the United States, the Great Depression caused another wave of mechanical skepticism, when a group calling themselves the “Technocrats” blamed mechanical advancements for high unemployment rates.

So widely-held was this fear of machines, economist Henry Hazlitt felt compelled to dedicate an entire chapter to debunking the myth that machines cause mass unemployment in his economic manifesto, Economics in One Lesson. In his chapter entitled, The Curse of The Machinery he writes:

The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.

To the credit of these mechanical skeptics Hazlitt called, “technophobes,” their fears of unemployment were not entirely incorrect.

In the case of the British stocking knitters, it is true that as many as 50,000 were left jobless in the wake of mechanical stocking frames. However, as Hazlitt points out, “But in so far as the rioters believed, as most of them undoubtedly did, that the machine was permanently displacing men, they were mistaken, for before the …read more

Source: The "Curse" Of Labor-Saving Machinery Is Nothing New

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