Although this is true, it is certainly not proportional. The automated process gets rid of the entire secretary, but only needs a tech once in a blue moon. The company contracts with an outside industry to supply the tech. This tech services the automation for a hundred different former secretaries.
With all due respect, that’s not how many these systems work or the point I was trying to make. Everything isn’t relative to the business owner whose may have few interactions with a technician. Although, I should have expanded on the definition of a technician.
When I said a technician is involved in maintaining a system used by a business owner, I am talking about hundreds of people involved in making a system function, not just the technician a business owner calls for support with his local system.
Smaller businesses haven't always used virtual systems that required technical support, but with the introduction of cloud-based virtual networks and other alternatives to buying equipment for a small business to store data and link together a personal network of computers, more and more small businesses are going to be able to automate some part of their businesses.
In addition to the number of applications that are useful to accounting for business owners that are examples of software as a service. With software as a service, there has to be people monitoring this system a lot more frequently than a packaged software program like Microsoft Excel.
Therefore, networks seem automated and like they work by themselves, but they don't. Testing before any product is deployed can only go so far to predict the way a system to respond to heavy traffic, or other factors the software might encounter that could cause it to crash.
With large databases, a lot of the time data is distributed across different servers so that the system you are using will seem like it is still working even when behind the scenes a server has gone down and technical support is working to get it up and running again. In the internet world, there are more ways to make it appear like the system never goes down.
So because of all this work going on behind the scenes, jobs in information technology are increasing and go unfilled. There are many articles about this.
IT jobs will grow 22% through 2020, says U.S.
The people doing these jobs may never interact with the business owner, but they are crucial to making sure the system he is using functions the way it is supposed to.
However, this is irrelevant to the reality that this discussion has existed since the dawn of the industrial age, and economists have observed ever since that when one job becomes obsolete, another job is created.
Many jobs became obsolete in the early part of the 20th century and that did not prevent the baby boomer generation from enjoying a vibrant economy filled with jobs and good wages that created a model of the way a middle class could exist. This was long before automation created through computer systems.
However, automation has another potential downside if it were to be contolled by a single entity. We are all aware of the comparison between the mark of the beast and a computer chip. So there are things to be concerned with. Job loss is just not one of them and the things that are concerning about computer technology and automation could be resolved to a certain extent by the distribution of education in technology.
The problem at the moment is that technology is advancing rapidly and people are becoming consumers of technology rather than understanding how the technology works. Being a consumer is going to create dependency on other people to provide these services and someone could easily take advantage of this. Although, this is easily remedied by studying the subject of computer science so that we are not just consumers of a technology and easy targets for a beast.
