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Automation and Unemployment

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Automation and employment
Automation is a job creator, not a job killer
To understand the impact of automation on employment, we must first study the economics of unemployment. Primarily, there are three types of unemployment. First, frictional unemployment, which refers to the unemployment that occurs when workers, who have either left or lost their jobs, search for a new job. Second, cyclical unemployment, which describes the unemployment associated with business cycles occurring in the economy and this unemployment occurs during recessions and depressions. Finally, structural unemployment is the permanent type of unemployment that occurs in long-term when the quantity of labor supplied exceeds the quantity of labor demanded in the economy. In the following section, we will discuss the relationship between automation and unemployment. Primarily, we will emphasize on two issues- 1) Automation does not result in permanent unemployment, and 2) Automation actually creates more jobs in the economy
Unemployment created by automation, or technological unemployment, is a type of frictional or temporary unemployment as unemployed workers eventually find new jobs. However, some people believed that technological unemployment might lead to structural unemployment. For several decades, indeed for centuries, the main controversy about technological unemployment has been whether it can ever lead to structural unemployment. The notion that unemployment created by automation may lead to structural unemployment is known as Luddite fallacy.
The Luddite premise was originated from Britain in the early 19th century, sometimes after automation had been introduced during the industrial revolution. At that time, many people feared that automation would take their jobs and people would remain unemployed forever because human labor would never be necessary. However,

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