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ARTICLE · 27 MAY 2014

Deloitte Monday Briefing: Technology Gets Disruptive

Since the industrial revolution technological innovation has widely been seen as a driver of human welfare, raising living standards and improving the quality of life.

United KingdomStrategy
  • Since the industrial revolution technological innovation has widely been seen as a driver of human welfare, raising living standards and improving the quality of life.
  • But technological change also provokes anxiety. A recurring theme over the last two hundred years is that technology destroys jobs and renders swathes of the population redundant.  
  • In the early nineteenth century a group of English textile workers, fearing that labour saving machinery would put them out of work, embarked on a campaign to destroy the new machines. In the 1930s the economist John Maynard Keynes coined the term "technological unemployment" to describe how productivity-enhancing innovation could create periods of unemployment. And in the 1970s, Clive Jenkins, a prominent UK trade union leader, predicted the dawning computer revolution would create mass unemployment and an abundance of leisure.

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