MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of “Race Against the Machine,” tells “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer about the job market “imbalance” resulting from rapidly advancing technology.
“Technology’s always been creating jobs, it’s always been destroying jobs. Ninety percent of Americans used to work on farms in 1800. Today it’s less than 2 percent. Now, all those people didn’t become unemployed, they went into new industries, like the auto industry that Henry Ford helped create and the work that Edison did and Steve Jobs and many others — whole new industries were created,” Brynjolfsson says. “What’s different this time is [that] the scale, scope and speed of the technological change is so great that the jobs that are being eliminated are a much bigger share of the economy than the new jobs that are being created.”
