Computing and Labour

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Does computing automation create new job opportunities ?

Abstract

From manufacturing to services, the growth of computing automation wants people to focus on high-value work and ideas. Meaningless work will gradually be replaced by automated systems. In fact , a large number of people spend their lives doing meaningless work (Graeber, 2019). On the contrary, by automating part of the work content, Amazon has set aside more time for employees to do work that requires thinking, thus expanding the market (Liu, 2020). By analyzing the conditions under which new work content is generated, this paper discusses whether computing automation creates new job opportunities.

There is no denying that computing automation has changed some forms of work and increased productivity. However, people's working hours have not been reduced to free up more ideas and innovations (Graeber, 2019). In other words, certain conditions must be met to generate new jobs.

From the perspective of information technology, the emergence of new jobs lies in people's ability to perform more information-related things. But when software becomes more powerful and cheaper, employers will still rationally choose to use machines instead of labor. Although more work can be created by computing, new work can also be done by computers.

From the perspective of a capitalist economy, new jobs need to be created on the premise of improving the interests of the company. Behind the intelligent computing requires a large amount of human resource judgment and experience to maintain the smooth operation of the network system (Gray, 2019). This part of workers still need to perform meaningless work content due to the reliance of automated systems on manpower, and these tasks continue to drain their time and energy, while still creating profits for the enterprise. Therefore, the total number of job opportunities has not changed, but the places of work have moved to more difficult conditions.

Abandoning external factors, from the perspective of personal development, new job opportunities are created by ourselves. Many people have to spend a lot of time in performing the above-mentioned meaningless tasks under the pressure of automated computing. They cannot find their own labor value in their work tasks, and their inner morals still force themselves to work. Computing can eliminate many of the forms of work we have become accustomed to, but we will always find other new jobs to take our place，because we regard labor as a virtue, which has nothing to do with the development of automated computing.

From the perspective of information technology, capital economy and personal development, computing automation has not created new job opportunities, and the generation of new job opportunities requires us to continue to improve the technical content, improve the social labor law, and find points of interest that reflect our own values.