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It depends on what you mean by higher education? Just Universities or all sorts of education that happens after one finishes school.Germany has something that is called the dual system for most practical jobs. As an example if you decide to become an electrician you apply at an company that offers an apprenticeship. In almost all cases they already hire at least one skilled, experienced electrician. Part of your time you will get on the job training by helping one or a set of experienced employees in your future trade, another part of your time you will attend a specialised school for your particular trade. After roughly three years you will get your certificate and in most cases can start to work-full time at the company where you learned that trade. Through your years of training you will get paid, normally your pay increases significantly year by year. And it is very seldom that you have to pay some sort of school fees in this system. To my knowledge this system is very unique to German speaking countries.So that is one difference. Now the difference when it comes to universities. First of all there are basically two types of Universities Hochschulen (which translates to High-Schools) and Universitäten (Universities) both. Hochschulen generally offer more applied degrees and generally only Bachelor degrees.Universities are research institutions, they offer Bachelor, Master, Ph.D and Professor titles. In contrast to the USA there are hardly any private universities in Germany, most institutions are tax funded and they are nearly free (for most students). There are fees which are generally about 300–400€ per term, but these do not even come close to finance the complete university. Most of the budget comes from taxes. So not a lot of students in Germany have to take up loans and those who have loans, typically have loans that are much lower then those of their counterparts in the USA.Going to university in the USA is also a life-style choice, living on campus rooting for the university football/basketball/baseball/swimming team, watching the marching band. Universities in the USA often look fancy and also have a lot of things that are not necessary for a strict research and education facility. Examples are stadions, fancy gardens, pools at student housing, club houses .They hardly look nice in Germany and those that look nice only do that because they are located in historic buildings.Two examples below:First the University of Paderborn, yes main campus is the set of those grey concrete buildings in the middle.Source: German Wikipedia Article about the University of Paderborn (Universität Paderborn – Wikipedia)Secondly, one building of the University of Mannheim. This building is indeed an old castle and it was NOT build to be a university from the start, the university just took it over.Source: German Wikipedia article about the University of Mannheim (Universität Mannheim – Wikipedia)But how is life different on campus? Well I am mostly going to talk out of experience here. I studied one term in the USA but most of my student life was in West-Germany. Most German universities are more less integrated into the cities. So students life is all over the city. Some universities are spread out through complete downtown areas of (for American standards) ancient cities( the universities of Heidelberg, Münster and Mannheim are examples for that). So it is very common for students to walk or bike through downtown on the way from one class to another. Some might stop for a coffee one the way or have beer. Some universities have campuses where most of the buildings are located in one big area (Dortmund, Paderborn and Bielefeld are examples for that). These compare more to US-Campuses especially those I have seen in the mid-west of the USA, California and Canada. But generally they are not as representative. What I mean by this the grass is cut clean there and and any trash lying around is put away but there are no fancy flower-yards forming the logo of the university or fountains and the buildings are generally build in a functional style. Universities are essential government buildings, they do not have to look good. So Stanford, OU, Berkley and other universities I’ve seen in the US are just a lot more beautiful. In Germany there are hardly any University sports clubs. When I studied in the US the Basketball and Football stadions of most universities where huge and sold out for every match. Here in Germany students identify more with the city they live in and the local sports clubs of those cities, often enough there are special deals for students and sometimes universities sponsor sports teams in the city. So in general students mix much more with the local population of their student city than in the US.Another huge difference is alcohol and driving. In Germany beer and/or wine (depending on the region) can be bought at the cafeteria and it is completely legal to consume them on campus and in-between lectures (depending on the university also during the lecture). Most universities also have regular, student organised parties where DJs come to the huge lecture halls and the university basically becomes a night-club. Alcoholic drinks based on Vodka, Beer and Jägermeister are very common on those parties. Generally there is also no closing time in Germany, so a club or bar can close whenever the hell the owner decides to close it. I was utterly surprised when we got kicked out of an Oklahoma student bar by the police because we wanted to finish our beer. This doesn't happen here, sure if you behave like shit you get kicked out by bouncers or the police but in most cases it’s gonna be like: “Ey folks finish your beer, it’s time to go home” and then you finish your drink just walk home or take the public transport which is free (or rather included in the student fees) for most students. It is also very common for big universities to have at least one festival per year where the complete university ground becomes a festival with several stages for bands/djs, bars, beer tents etc and have one day of partying.Another big difference is, that there is no required attendance for most university classes. You can decide not to go to a specific lecture and if you can pass the exam without ever showing up, then you’re fine. Most subjects do not have any sort of homework or regular practice groups and those that have them are as the lecture themselves optional. So keeping up with your studies takes a lot of self-discipline compared to the US. In the USA a lecturers job is to teach his or her students the stuff and if lot’s of them fail, he or she might get in trouble. In Germany professors are more focused on research and especially their master classes are often just summaries of their research. A professors job in Germany is to empower his or her students to be able to learn the important stuff themselves. So compared to the US I needed a lot more self-study-time per time spent in an lecture. I would say classes are generally harder and professors are harder to approach. That is why students generally spent less time per week in lectures and more time self-studying compared to the USA. In contrast to the US midterms are very rare most classes have exactly one final exam and that is all. Usually those exams are spread out over the lecture free time. In the US basically all universities have a final’s week. This does not exist in Germany. Every university and every department has individual regulations. So in some universities exams are spread out through the whole lecture-free season. So it might be that you have an exam right after the last lecture then two weeks break then two exams in two days, then one more the week afterwards and then the new term starts. Professors and institutions are generally a lot freer to schedule this and also change the exam date, so students have to be much more flexible. But in most cases students are also much freer to just decide to not show up without getting a fail. In my case I was allowed to just notify a professor one week before the exam without giving any specific reason.Another aspect are distances, the USA is huge. All of Germany is roughly the size of Oklahoma. Public infrastructure is a heaven compared to the standard of US-cities. I moved out of state for my bachelor’s degree and had a four hour train trip from my university city back home to my parents. That was a long distance in German perception and one trip did cost about 60€ taking High Speed trains. So I visited roughly every 6 weeks and that was a lot compared to my peers. In the USA I met quite a few students that drove more than 4 hours one way every weekend to see their family.Life in Europe and Germany in specific is different to the USA. The culture values different things and you can see it university life as well. In summary university life in Germany takes much more place in the city and not just on campus. Furthermore, students have to be more self-organised and in my opinion more discipline is needed here.

Yes, the horrors of untouchability, social discrimination and oppression do still exist in India.One in four people in India still practice untouchability.Sixty-four years after caste untouchability was abolished by the Constitution, more than a fourth of Indians say they continue to practise it in some form in their homes, the biggest ever survey of its kind has revealed.Going by respondents’ admissions, untouchability is the most widespread among Brahmins, followed by OBCs. Among religious communities, it is the most widespread among Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, shows the survey, which was conducted in over 42,000 households across India by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, US.Source: The India Human Development Survey (IHDS-2)NCAER, established in 1956, is India’s oldest and largest independent, non-profit economic policy research institute. [1]One in four Indians admit to practicing untouchability, reveals a surveyOne in four Indians admit to practicing untouchabilityHere are a few examples of modern day oppression.17-year-old Dalit youth not allowed to enter temple, shot dead by upper caste men for arguingWas not allowed to enter temple: Dalit minister informs HP AssemblyTension after Dalits banned from a temple in Kanpur'You’re like chappals, stay outside’: Dalits denied entry into temple in KarnatakaCaste-based discrimination continues: Dalits denied entry into temples, barber shops - The FederalOfficials arrange for Dalits to pray outside Karnataka temple as violence breaks out over entry banDalits Barred From Entering UP Temple, Told Not to Step Out for 10 DaysNot allowed in temple, Dalit women allege caste biasDalit Women Allegedly Denied Entry Into Temple In Uttar Pradesh: ReportDalits and temple entry in Tamil NaduTension over temple entry by DalitsDalits Not Allowed to Enter Tirupur Temple80 years since Travancore's temple entry,Dalits forced to fight for right to prayDalit groom visits Ram temple under police protection in MPDalit dilemma: Wooed in polls, shooed away from shrines | India Today InvestigationIs temple entry to be the final goal of the advancement in the social status of the Depressed Classes in the Hindu fold? Or is it only the first step and if it is the first step, what is the ultimate goal? Temple entry as a final goal, the Depressed Classes can never support. Indeed they will not only reject it, but they would then regard themselves rejected by Hindu Society and free to find their own destiny elsewhere. On the other hand, it is only to be the first step they may be inclined to support it.-- BR Ambedkar [2]There are Ministers, MPs, MLAs and many government employees who have been denied entry into temples and discriminated based on caste. Just because someone is a government employee it does not bar them from facing discrimination.Here are some examples.Dalit panchayat president made to sit on floor in Tamil Nadu's CuddaloreDalit MLA from AP visits Ganesh pandal, faces casteist abuses for ‘polluting’ deityDalit employee commits suicide due to harassment by colleaguesPrivilege motion against SAD MLA for his remarksDalit Orissa MLA served food separately, alleges caste discriminationHere are some examples of modern day untouchability in our esteemed institutions.2,400 students dropped out of IITs in 2 years, nearly half were SC, ST, OBCThe IITs have a long history of systematically othering Dalit students'Caste discrimination continues to exist in IIT-Bombay'Payal Tadvi: The ‘strong’, ‘bold’ girl, broken allegedly by castePayal Tadvi's suicide exposes how under-representation of Dalits, Adivasis, caste discrimination affect higher education institutes - India News , FirstpostAt a protest for Fathima, a backdrop tells the story of institutional discriminationSuicide by Dalit students in 4 yearsHarassment of Dalit professor in IIT Kanpur exemplifies the subtle ways of caste discrimination in India today - India News , FirstpostStudents allege caste discrimination based on eating habits at eating facility in IIT MadrasSeparate entrance, washbasins for ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’ in IIT-M mess, student group fumesJust 12.4% IIT-M faculty belong to reserved categoriesLess Than 3% of All Faculty Members at IITs Are SC/STPurity, Pollution and the Drive to Turn IIT Bombay into a Modern AgraharamScheduled Caste students discriminated against in IITs, IIMs, AIIMS: NCSCBrahmins on India’s elite campuses say studying science is natural to upper castes: StudyAIIMS discriminates against SC, ST, OBC doctors: MPsEighty-four percent of the SC/ST students surveyed said examiners had asked them about their caste directly or indirectly during their evaluations. One student said: “Teachers are fine till they do not know your caste. The moment they come to know, their attitude towards you changes completely.” AIIMS initially rejected the Thorat committee findings, and only agreed to implement them after the exit of the then director. [3]Indians do carry caste with them everywhere and the other countries governments are stepping in to curb this social discrimination.California sues Cisco for alleged discrimination against employee because of casteState-wise rate of crimes against Scheduled Castes And Scheduled Tribes (2006 — 2016)Dalits or Scheduled Castes, comprise 16.6 percent (201 million) of India’s population, up from 16.2 percent in 2001, according to Census 2011. Adivasis form 8.6 percent (104 million) of the country’s population, up from 8.2 percent over a decade.As many as 422,799 crimes against Dalits or scheduled castes (SCs)*** and 81,332 crimes against Adivasis were reported between 2006 and 2016. The highest increases in crimes against Dalits were recorded in eight states–Goa, Kerala, Delhi, Gujarat, Bihar, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Sikkim–where rates rose over 10 times. The highest increase in crime rates recorded against Adivasis was reported in Kerala, Karnataka and Bihar. [4]And the crime rate is only increasing rapidly instead of being on the decline.Crimes against Dalits increased by 6% from 2009 to 2018 with over 3.91 lakh atrocities being reported, at the same time gaps in implementation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 and the 1995 rules framed under it remained, according to a report released on Friday. [5]An insight into the kind of atrocities practiced in India.Of the 5,775 offences registered solely under the SC/ST Act in 2017 with Dalits as victims, 3,172 (55%) were related to “Intentionally Insult or Intimidate with Intent to Humiliate”. There were 47 cases of land grabbing related to Dalits; they faced social boycott in 63 cases; and they were prevented from using public spaces in 12 cases.The most insult cases were reported from Karnataka (1,175) followed by UP (804), and Bihar (338). Sixteen land grab cases each were reported from Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka. Cases of preventing a Dalit from using public space were reported from Maharashtra, Himachal, Karnataka, Kerala, and Punjab. Fifty-seven of the 63 cases of social boycott or of a Dalit being forced to leave his place of residence were reported from UP. [6]So, if someone from India is asking this question that does untouchability and social discrimination still exist in India, then I'm sorry to say you're living in a imaginary bubble. They very much exist and the crime rates against the oppressed are rapidly increasing every year too.Footnotes[1] Biggest caste survey: One in four Indians admit to practising untouchability[2] Sabarimala row: What the historical opposition to Dalits entry into temples tells us about social change[3] India's Universities Are Falling Terribly Short on Addressing Caste Discrimination[4] National Crime Records Bureau ( NCRB Data ) | Crime Against Dalits[5] Crimes against Dalits increased by 6 percent between 2009 and 2018: report[6] NCRB data: Insults made up 50% of crimes against Dalits, ‘traps’ of corrupt officials spiked

Bill Gates is exactly correct as usual. Bill Gates is the richest person in the world principally because he leveraged technology to create immense wealth by replacing humans with computers.I would add that this process has been occurring for decades and continues to speed up.Thinking machines will replace most human workers sooner than most people imagine.This video is an overview, please at least watch it for a few minutes.What follows is more supporting evidence including an article from the Economist.Jeff Ronne's answer to Is technology eliminating jobs at a faster rate than they are being created?Robots / computer assisted humans produce goods and services cheaper / more efficiently than humans alone. In a capitalist system robots will win as the companies using technology will dominate in the marketplace as only the most profitable companies survive and grow. The world's capital is flowing towards automation and away from investing in human labor simply because automation has a better ROI. This is the tipping point economically speaking. The point of no return.Perfect is the enemy of goodIn an engineering / technology business sense means you do not have to replace the worker with technology. You simply have to make the worker more productive with technology, using less workers in total while increasing economic production. The robot / computer / software works cooperatively with the worker. So in the end where there used to be 1M jobs, it reduces to 800k then to 500k then to 250k etc ... over time as technology advances. All the while the production of goods and services is rising with lower costs. When economic growth requires less people and jobs year after year you have an insurmountable problem.This is happening at the present time. This is why we have a "jobless" recovery. No one wants to acknowledge the reason why. The trend of technology replacing virtually every worker destroys the model of capitalism. Capitalism assumes that economic production chiefly employees people not machines. Workers derive personal wealth from employment. When the majority of goods and services are produced by machines without human labor then the capitalist model falls completely apart.Technology is a chief driver of growing wealth inequality in the USA and the world. This has created a rich class of owners (the 5% that make and own the technology along with the minority that they employ) and an increasingly poorer class of workers scrambling for an ever decreasing number of low paying service jobs.In Silicon Valley there is an elite relatively small economic class of ordinary citizens with a large amount of wealth derived solely from automation (also known as productivity technology / disruptive change which is tech speak for doing more output with less workers).As for the argument that productivity technology only impacts low paying jobs is false. Automation is first geared precisely towards high paying, high value jobs. That is where the money and profits reside for automation. Bill Gates is still the richest person in the world in part because he automated high paid office work with Microsoft office and email. Yes CPAs, business and finance people use excel as their primary language. What would take a CPA in the 1960's a month to do can be done in an hour today. Most financial software automates jobs that accountants performed.In fact venture capital and invested corporate capital deliberately targets those jobs / industries with the highest costs. It will likely take a 100 years to maybe 200 years to completely replace most jobs with technology. It may never fully complete perhaps leaving 1% or 10% of the population having to perform needed tasks (not work per se, not employment per se because these concepts may cease to exist in the post capitalist economic model).Despite the claims to the contrary it is different this time. We are not talking about horses, trains, assembly lines, etc ... We are talking about intelligent robots with advanced technology that learn quickly without limit in the end. Robots are general purpose and will do any job better and faster as time marches on. Most human work can be automated with certainty given enough time. As new jobs are created they will be automated in short order as the training process only happens once for all robots. Unlike humans which have to be individually trained in costly manner, training one robot is effectively training all robots for all of time. Humans are inefficient in comparison, they die taking most if not all of their knowledge with them.The future role for money, taxes and traditional jobs may likely not exist as we know it today. These concepts are predicated on an economic system that will no longer likely exist.The transition to a jobless economy where only a small number of robot designers are gainfully employed could be extremely problematic. Rising wealth inequality might be inevitable unless we abandon our 19th century economic concepts and move into the 22nd century economy.This article from the Economist last year provides a worthwhile overview to the matter. This is becoming a mainstream of new economic thought.Everyone owes it to themselves and their families to personally know what the future may likely hold. The technology and automation trend spans the globe, no one can escape it in the end especially future generations.The onrushing wave"Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change."IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers.One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.For the most part, they did not. Nowadays, the majority of economists confidently wave such worries away. By raising productivity, they argue, any automation which economises on the use of labour will increase incomes. That will generate demand for new products and services, which will in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. To think otherwise has meant being tarred a Luddite—the name taken by 19th-century textile workers who smashed the machines taking their jobs.For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.When the sleeper wakesYet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world’s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labour has fallen.At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden, inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others.Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978, and although some of that is due to the effects of ageing, some is not. In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.This is one indication, Mr Summers says, that technical change is increasingly taking the form of “capital that effectively substitutes for labour”. There may be a lot more for such capital to do in the near future. A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.Answering the question of whether such automation could lead to prolonged pain for workers means taking a close look at past experience, theory and technological trends. The picture suggested by this evidence is a complex one. It is also more worrying than many economists and politicians have been prepared to admit.The lathe of heavenEconomists take the relationship between innovation and higher living standards for granted in part because they believe history justifies such a view. Industrialisation clearly led to enormous rises in incomes and living standards over the long run. Yet the road to riches was rockier than is often appreciated.In 1500 an estimated 75% of the British labour force toiled in agriculture. By 1800 that figure had fallen to 35%. When the shift to manufacturing got under way during the 18th century it was overwhelmingly done at small scale, either within the home or in a small workshop; employment in a large factory was a rarity. By the end of the 19th century huge plants in massive industrial cities were the norm. The great shift was made possible by automation and steam engines.Industrial firms combined human labour with big, expensive capital equipment. To maximise the output of that costly machinery, factory owners reorganised the processes of production. Workers were given one or a few repetitive tasks, often making components of finished products rather than whole pieces. Bosses imposed a tight schedule and strict worker discipline to keep up the productive pace. The Industrial Revolution was not simply a matter of replacing muscle with steam; it was a matter of reshaping jobs themselves into the sort of precisely defined components that steam-driven machinery needed—cogs in a factory system.The way old jobs were done changed; new jobs were created. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University in Illinois, argues that the more intricate machines, techniques and supply chains of the period all required careful tending. The workers who provided that care were well rewarded. As research by Lawrence Katz, of Harvard University, and Robert Margo, of Boston University, shows, employment in manufacturing “hollowed out”. As employment grew for highly skilled workers and unskilled workers, craft workers lost out. This was the loss to which the Luddites, understandably if not effectively, took exception.With the low-skilled workers far more numerous, at least to begin with, the lot of the average worker during the early part of this great industrial and social upheaval was not a happy one. As Mr Mokyr notes, “life did not improve all that much between 1750 and 1850.” For 60 years, from 1770 to 1830, growth in British wages, adjusted for inflation, was imperceptible because productivity growth was restricted to a few industries. Not until the late 19th century, when the gains had spread across the whole economy, did wages at last perform in line with productivity (see chart 1).Along with social reforms and new political movements that gave voice to the workers, this faster wage growth helped spread the benefits of industrialisation across wider segments of the population. New investments in education provided a supply of workers for the more skilled jobs that were by then being created in ever greater numbers. This shift continued into the 20th century as post-secondary education became increasingly common.Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University, and Mr Katz have written that workers were in a “race between education and technology” during this period, and for the most part they won. Even so, it was not until the “golden age” after the second world war that workers in the rich world secured real prosperity, and a large, property-owning middle class came to dominate politics. At the same time communism, a legacy of industrialisation’s harsh early era, kept hundreds of millions of people around the world in poverty, and the effects of the imperialism driven by European industrialisation continued to be felt by billions.The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.Take computers. In the early 20th century a “computer” was a worker, or a room of workers, doing mathematical calculations by hand, often with the end point of one person’s work the starting point for the next. The development of mechanical and electronic computing rendered these arrangements obsolete. But in time it greatly increased the productivity of those who used the new computers in their work.Many other technical innovations had similar effects. New machinery displaced handicraft producers across numerous industries, from textiles to metalworking. At the same time it enabled vastly more output per person than craft producers could ever manage.Player pianoFor a task to be replaced by a machine, it helps a great deal if, like the work of human computers, it is already highly routine. Hence the demise of production-line jobs and some sorts of book-keeping, lost to the robot and the spreadsheet. Meanwhile work less easily broken down into a series of stereotyped tasks—whether rewarding, as the management of other workers and the teaching of toddlers can be, or more of a grind, like tidying and cleaning messy work places—has grown as a share of total employment.But the “race” aspect of technological change means that such workers cannot rest on their pay packets. Firms are constantly experimenting with new technologies and production processes. Experimentation with different techniques and business models requires flexibility, which is one critical advantage of a human worker. Yet over time, as best practices are worked out and then codified, it becomes easier to break production down into routine components, then automate those components as technology allows.If, that is, automation makes sense. As David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out in a 2013 paper, the mere fact that a job can be automated does not mean that it will be; relative costs also matter. When Nissan produces cars in Japan, he notes, it relies heavily on robots. At plants in India, by contrast, the firm relies more heavily on cheap local labour.Even when machine capabilities are rapidly improving, it can make sense instead to seek out ever cheaper supplies of increasingly skilled labour. Thus since the 1980s (a time when, in America, the trend towards post-secondary education levelled off) workers there and elsewhere have found themselves facing increased competition from both machines and cheap emerging-market workers.Such processes have steadily and relentlessly squeezed labour out of the manufacturing sector in most rich economies. The share of American employment in manufacturing has declined sharply since the 1950s, from almost 30% to less than 10%. At the same time, jobs in services soared, from less than 50% of employment to almost 70% (see chart 2). It was inevitable, therefore, that firms would start to apply the same experimentation and reorganisation to service industries.A new wave of technological progress may dramatically accelerate this automation of brain-work. Evidence is mounting that rapid technological progress, which accounted for the long era of rapid productivity growth from the 19th century to the 1970s, is back. The sort of advances that allow people to put in their pocket a computer that is not only more powerful than any in the world 20 years ago, but also has far better software and far greater access to useful data, as well as to other people and machines, have implications for all sorts of work.The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free no one doubts such mastery is possible, though the speed at which fully self-driving cars will come to market remains hard to guess.Brave new worldEven after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.Jobs that are not easily automated may still be transformed. New data-processing technology could break “cognitive” jobs down into smaller and smaller tasks. As well as opening the way to eventual automation this could reduce the satisfaction from such work, just as the satisfaction of making things was reduced by deskilling and interchangeable parts in the 19th century. If such jobs persist, they may engage Mr Graeber’s “bullshit” detector.Being newly able to do brain work will not stop computers from doing ever more formerly manual labour; it will make them better at it. The designers of the latest generation of industrial robots talk about their creations as helping workers rather than replacing them; but there is little doubt that the technology will be able to do a bit of both—probably more than a bit. A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?There will still be jobs. Even Mr Frey and Mr Osborne, whose research speaks of 47% of job categories being open to automation within two decades, accept that some jobs—especially those currently associated with high levels of education and high wages—will survive (see table). Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.And although Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee rightly point out that developing the business models which make the best use of new technologies will involve trial and error and human flexibility, it is also the case that the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.The potential for dramatic change is clear. A future of widespread technological unemployment is harder for many to accept. Every great period of innovation has produced its share of labour-market doomsayers, but technological progress has never previously failed to generate new employment opportunities.The productivity gains from future automation will be real, even if they mostly accrue to the owners of the machines. Some will be spent on goods and services—golf instructors, household help and so on—and most of the rest invested in firms that are seeking to expand and presumably hire more labour. Though inequality could soar in such a world, unemployment would not necessarily spike. The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3).These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.Such emotional and relational work could be as critical to the future as metal-bashing was in the past, even if it gets little respect at first. Cultural norms change slowly. Manufacturing jobs are still often treated as “better”—in some vague, non-pecuniary way—than paper-pushing is. To some 18th-century observers, working in the fields was inherently more noble than making gewgaws.But though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price, were it not that no televisions that poor are still made. However, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up. If people lived on widgets alone— goods whose costs have fallen because of both globalisation and technology—there would have been no pause in the increase of real wages. It is the increase in the prices of stuff that isn’t mechanised (whose supply is often under the control of the state and perhaps subject to fundamental scarcity) that means a pay packet goes no further than it used to.So technological progress squeezes some incomes in the short term before making everyone richer in the long term, and can drive up the costs of some things even more than it eventually increases earnings. As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.The machine stopsEven if the long-term outlook is rosy, with the potential for greater wealth and lots of new jobs, it does not mean that policymakers should simply sit on their hands in the mean time. Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the “reservation wage”—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour.Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.