O’Brien lulling us into false sense of security on the economy
■ I would like to reply to Dan O’Brien regarding his article about the present economic situation in which he said there is no evidence that technology eliminates jobs (‘Ignore the doomsayers – there is little evidence of robots taking over our jobs’, Irish Independent, January 18).
I wonder how he reconciles such confidence with a warning from a senior OECD executive, Professor William White, that “the world financial system is as stretched today as it was at the peak of the last bubble, but this time authorities are caught in a policy trap with few defences left”.
I wonder if news of Amazon’s technological supermarket where people just pack their shopping bags and walk out without a checkout in sight is evidence of anything changing on the job front?
Whenever I read Mr O’Brien and his colleagues predicting employment of the technological future or enthusing about the giant debt-laden so-called recovery since 2008, I think of Michael Fish, an expert meteorologist, assuring a caller to the BBC who had heard warnings of some wind, that calm and tranquillity would prevail, only hours before the worst storm for three centuries savaged southern England.
Mr Fish was an expert in his field and usually most reliable but who, for one reason or another, made an enormous mistake in October 1987 and issued a disastrous prediction.
I fear economists, worthy experts in their field, are at this time making disastrous mistakes about the power of technology to eliminate work.
Unless new policies are devised and applied, this will push unemployment to unsustainable levels that will challenge and pose serious risk to social order, democracy and civilisation itself.
They lull us into complacency, just as people in southern England were, to be rudely awakened to a devastating development they were entirely unprepared for.
Padraic Neary Tubbercurry, Co Sligo