GWYNNE DYER - JOBS ARE LEAVING & NOT COMING BACK

This article was written by Gwynne Dyer and published in the Waterloo Region Record on November 5, 2016. The title is "The jobs are going, and they aren't coming back". Overall it is a very depressing article advising us that yes various free trade agreements have done major economic harm to North Americans but that they are by no means the only cause. Job losses have been and will continue to be huge courtesy of technology and automation. I can recall as far back as the 1970s people worrying about job losses due to industrial robots and automation. Well the technology and automation have simply increased exponentially. Think of driverless cars. They are very close to being economically feasible and will literally put millions of truck drivers, cab drivers and delivery drivers out of work worldwide.

Gwynne Dyer compares the coming evolution to the Industrial Revolution in the 1880s through till the 1940s. It was an angry and turbulent time but society came out of it eventually better off. Mr. Dyer thinks that this coming evolution could and should be handled much better than the last one. I hope he's right including his thoughts that we can as a society provide a form of guaranteed minimum income and that if done that will make the transition much easier for everyone.