Douglas Carswell

Cheer up! Digital does not mean mass unemployment

Computers, it has become fashionable to say, are taking over. Its not just that they allow us to shop or bank online. They are, we are told, able to do more and more things that were once done by humans.

It is not merely a matter of automated checkouts and driverless cars. Ever more sophisticated digital technology means that computers may one day be capable of doing some of the things that solicitors and doctors currently do.

The techno pessimists seem cheered by the thought of mass redundancy. Technology, which has for so long raised living standards, will put us out of work, they imply. Nonsense.

Of course new technology is going to be disruptive. It will destroy jobs – and cause hardship and upheaval for those affected. But people will do what they have always done when technology increases our productive capacity; they'll find work doing something even more productive.

Here in my corner of rural Essex, a handful of combine harvesters have been getting in the wheat and the barley. A dozen or so men have been busily doing what once every villager would have laboured long and hard to achieve.  Indeed, the local schools did not start again until mid September, once the harvest was in, so that children could help out, too. 

When agriculture was mechanised many jobs went, including the one's that meant having youngsters labour in the fields. At the time it might have seemed that farm labourers might not easily find more work. But they did - and their descendants work in shops and offices doing less backbreaking work, with longer leisure hours.

Machines destroyed the job of charcoal burner, blacksmith, miller and candle maker, too.  Most of the jobs that existed in rural Essex a century or so ago have gone. Yet there are more people working in this part of Essex than ever before.

The digital doomsters cannot imagine what everyone might do for a living in the future. That tells us less about the future than it does about the difficulty they have imagining it.

In thirty years time, more people will be working in more productive jobs, sustaining an even higher standard of living than today. (Unless, of course, Jeremy Corbyn gets in). Cheer up!

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