‘What happened to all the file clerks?’ Automation makes humans moreuseful, not less

'What happened to all the file clerks?' Automation makes humans moreuseful, not less

A nice piece on the BBC website today illustrates the fallacy behind this idea that robots will make humans useless. The piece describes the creation of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program.

With VisiCalc’s introduction in 1979, 99% of the drudgery that accountants had to perform (or hire others to perform) in updating each cell in a spreadsheet by hand was eliminated overnight. And as a result, hundreds of thousands of accounting clerk jobs simply vanished.

Given that one of the Democratic presidential candidates is running on the fear that people will become obsolete and irrelevant to the economy, it is […]

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