WASHINGTON — Next week’s Canadian federal budget will raise concern about workers being displaced en masse by new technologies. It’s arguably an under-told story of the last U.S. election — people often talked about Ohio and Pennsylvania’s coal miners and steel workers, less so about technologies pushing them aside: automated steel production, and the 3D underground imaging finding cheaper natural gas.
It’s a concern as old as policy-making itself.
The very first book of Aristotle’s ”Politics” warned that if shuttles could weave and harps could pluck themselves, labourers and slaves would be obsolete. When the inventor of the knitting machine came asking Queen Elizabeth for a patent in 1589, she saw a political problem.
Read full story here: Machines Replacing Workers: Fed Budget To Look At Historic Economic Challenge | The Chronicle Herald
