Automation poses threat of human skills redundancy

The real threat to American jobs isn’t foreign workers – it’s automation, a point proven by Kevin La Grandeur, Ph.D., an English Professor at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and co-editor of the newly published book Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work.

As he notes, “Technological unemployment is growing rampant in the United States, with intelligent machines displacing American workers every day. Eighty-eight percent of manufacturing job losses over the past few years are a result of decreased demand for human labor. Machines have been a bigger job-killer to U.S. jobs than both immigrants and outsourcing, and the problem is only growing worse.”

In an op-ed recently featured in USA Today, LaGrandeur argues that intelligent technology is displacing not only manual labor, but even middle-class jobs and higher level jobs. La Grandeur notes that this also includes accountants, who risk a very significant percent chance of being displaced by intelligent technology in the next ten years. This is also true of other professionals such as journalists and technical writers.

“For a large part of America, intelligent technology has produced not only opportunity, but also heartache, as seen with the recent election season and the middle class’s desperation for job opportunity,” says LaGrandeur.