A worker watches as automated robots assemble automobile parts. Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Luddite lesson

Even among those who reject robot hysteria, some warn that technology is harming the middle class. MIT’s David Autor recalls the Luddites, 19th century English textile workers who destroyed labor-saving technology because they feared for their jobs. Autor admits that many 19th century Britons benefited from the introduction of mechanized (or power) looms; unskilled laborers got stable jobs as loom operators and a growing middle class gained the means to afford mass-produced fabrics. But he suggests that a group of middle-skilled textile workers probably didn’t benefit on the whole. The same thing, he says, is happening to a similar subset of workers today, and the middle class is suffering as a result.

We have a dangerously lopsided economy wherein the productivity gains from improving technology are funneled to those at the top.

William Lazonick, an economist at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell and an expert in the history of the business corporation, disagrees. As he sees it, technological advances boost productivity, and, depending on how those productivity gains get divvied up, can bring us better, more fulfilling jobs, just as happened in Britain during the 19th century. According to Lazonick, textile workers who operated power looms in factories were not unskilled, as Autor suggests, and fared better than the cottage handloom weavers whose work the machines ultimately displaced. The middle class benefited from technology as factory weavers got unions — and, by the latter half of the 19th century, decent wages. Machines and humans complemented each other, and Britain became “the workshop of the world.” In the 1920s and ’30s, the British lost textile markets when the Japanese introduced even more advanced power looms. As a result, Japanese textile workers enjoyed more plentiful jobs, higher wages and better work conditions. (The inventor and leading producer of the Japanese automatic loom was the Toyoda Automatic Loom Co., out of which sprang a very familiar auto company that would help transform Japan into one of the richest nations in the world.)

Lopsided benefits