Two-Thirds Of Workers In Developing Nations To Be Replaced by Robots: Report

robotsBy Jake Anderson

An alarming new report from the United Nations is the latest in a litany of studies suggesting that the coming age of automation and workforces dominated by robots will be upon us much faster than previously thought. The U.N. now claims two-thirds of the human labor force in developing nations will be replaced by automation.

The U.N. says a Universal Basic Income will be necessary as a stop-gap for the 75% of humans left without work.

Anti-Media previously reported on predictions that half the American workforce could be replaced by automation within the next two decades. Another report’s statistics suggested automated software could fleece 1.7 million truckers of their jobs within a decade.

The U.N.’s UNCTAD report notes that taken on a global scale, we’re seeing “premature deindustrialization.”

“The increased use of robots in developed countries risks eroding the traditional labor-cost advantage of developing countries,” the report explains.

A disturbing additional report from the World Bank observes:

The share of occupations that could experience significant automation is actually higher in developing countries than in more advanced ones, where many of these jobs have already disappeared.

Developing countries are advised to react to new ‘disruptive technologies’ by embracing radical digital technology and “supportive macroeconomic, industrial and social policies.”

A larger looming question concerns how people will react to such job losses. How will the 1.7 million truckers who are primed to lose their jobs to automation take this? Transhumanist candidate Zoltan Istvan warned it wouldn’t be a pretty sight and that in fact, it could lead to violent uprisings, which is why Istvan supports a UBI.

As Anti-Media previously reported:

Zoltan says the coming age of robots replacing humans in the workforce could be a net positive, allowing humans explore education and leisure in a way previous generations couldn’t have imagined. He advocates for a Universal Basic Income and a federally-provided social safety net that would reduce the chances of chaos and rioting when the robot economy goes into full swing.

But this vision of a future transhumanist utopia smacks of American and Western exceptionalism. People in developing countries may not have a Universal Basic Income available to them, and even if they do, their general impoverished living conditions and anemic social infrastructure may eclipse opportunities for leisure and entrepreneurship.

These are questions that will be asked with increasing frequency in the next 10 years. The age of automation threatens the very nature of human labor and may require us to re-imagine the role of the human being within post-industrial societies.

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This article (Report: Two-Thirds of Workers in Developing Nations to Be Replaced by Robots) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.


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7 Comments on "Two-Thirds Of Workers In Developing Nations To Be Replaced by Robots: Report"

  1. Do what you want. Just leave me alone, if I ask.

  2. How come the robots aren’t causing global warming?

  3. I’m all in for automation and having time to educate ourselves and have fun. But… This is not going to work in the current monetary system where they only seek to exploit us. In order for this to work we need to abolish money / private property and jobs as we know them now. And don’t you talk about socialism as this has nothing to do with it.

  4. The SMART tech A.I. robots are being rolled out to take over all basic functions as planned …as the 99% gets steadily & incrementally marginalized thru a steady attrition of job loss, lower pay & disappearing benefits while pension plans are blatantly stolen by the neoziocon Wall St. ‘gangsta banksta’s’ like John Corzine…& eventually the severely hobbled populace is again marginalized further & forced to accept being supported by a bloated ‘Super Bureaucrat’ Gov. with food stamps & welfare…as the 99% are eventually compressed inside massive urban centers after being chased out of the rural countryside via Agenda 21/30…whereupon they’re forcibly ‘mandated’ to receive toxic vaccines or be denied GMO food & aspartame/sugar sodas with fluoride & line up for 10 blocks a day to shuffle up the line for a bowl of Soylent Green.
    …Now the 0.01% NWO juggernaut oversees the ‘Wasting-Away’ of people that are getting sick & dying….the old & young are the 1st to go while most are sequestered inside their shoe- box apartments that absorbs most of the $$$ from their welfare check…What’s not to love?
    …If this is the future you want…Don’t do anything but continue sleep-walk thru every day & deliberately confuse reality with that that is supplied for you thru the one-eyed alpha wave idiot box ‘celebrities on ‘Reality TV’

  5. The terminator bot cometh.

  6. For those who can’t see this will make us all reliant on government hand-outs, which also gives them control over how we use said hand-outs, I would like to tell you all you’re playing right into their hands and you deserve to be owned, controlled and manipulated, because that’s precisely what they’ll do. This is socialism, communism, and fascism on steroids, and they’re already implementing it. Jobs are disappearing faster than farts (pardon), and soon, everyone will have to stay inside their government doled box next door to others living in their government doled boxes, sitting there on their boxy couches with boxes on their heads to give them a virtual “experience” of what real life was all about before the box. Yeah, sounds like great fun to me, not.

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