"Hammerson says: Brent Cross will create 27,000 new jobs." The Observer and New York Times on job loss through technology

Link to The Observer

"It's no joke – the robots will really take over this time"

"... At this point, many readers will yawn knowingly. We have, after all, heard this kind of heady talk before – in the 1960s, for example, when robots arrived on automobile assembly lines and there were dire predictions about mass unemployment caused by these new machines. It didn't happen, or at any rate it didn't happen as advertised.

"Many assembly-line jobs did disappear, but new kinds of enterprise appeared, and displaced workers found new employment and the prosperity machine rolled on. So are BBC Newsnight's David Grossman and his MIT interlocutors just winding us up?

Not so, they insist. The problem, they say, is that most people have no idea of the abilities of these new technologies. They point to the Google self-driving car as an example of a capability that – until recently – most people thought would be the exclusive preserve of human beings for a long time to come. Yet the cars now exist and are safer than human-controlled vehicles.

"And if computers can safely drive cars in crowded urban environments, they can certainly do a lot of the tasks currently performed by office workers. This time, in other words, is different. We really are standing on the brink of an inflection point."

---

Link to New York Times

"Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality"

"... Conventional wisdom in economics has long held that technological change affects income inequality by increasing the rewards to skill — through a dynamic called “skill-biased technical change.” Losers are workers whose job can be replaced by machines (textile workers, for example). Those whose skills are enhanced by machines (think Wall Street traders using ultrafast computers) win.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that this is not the whole story and that the skills-heavy narrative of inequality is not as straightforward as economists once believed. The persistent decline in the labor share of income suggests another dynamic. Call it 'capital-biased technical change' — which encourages replacing decently-paid workers with a machine, regardless of their skill.

For instance, research by the Canadian economists Paul Beaudry, David Green and Benjamin Sand finds that demand for highly-skilled workers in the United States peaked around 2000 and then fell, even as their supply continued to grow. This pushed the highly-educated down the ladder of skills in search of jobs, pushing less-educated workers further down."