People sometimes worry about the displacement of workers by rapid advances in technology, but seldom have numbers or charts to back up their worries.
Well, here’s a fairly grim chart. It depicts labor’s share of US income (broadly, the % of GDP that goes to pay workers), which goes down as companies’ rely less on human workers, more on technology (an extreme example being Facebook, with an estimated market value of $85 billion, and only 2,000 employees). Look at how steep the collapse is since 2001 — and maybe it’s just getting started. See also my previous posts on this looming sociocultural problem (here and here).
