This is the kind of irony people generally like: a story turning totally differently as expected, in favor of the humble, the weak or the poor. The humble heroes here are the workers, who were told for years that they’ll become redundant as their routine jobs will be taken over by automation, artificial intelligence and robots.

Now, as the year 2023 is still in its first month, we can witness that the opposite has happened.

Instead of job-killing automation, bosses complain about a shortage of workers!

The article “The pandemic and the triumph of the Luddites”, published December 20, 2022 by The Economist summarizes in an ironic (yet pleasant) tone how the predicted takeover of jobs not only did not materialize, but the exact opposite happened!

And one sentence in the article sums it up:  “..it is hard to find much evidence of job-killing automation. Rather than workers complaining about a shortage of jobs, bosses complain about a shortage of workers.”

In 2017 I was among the “analysts” (well, that is a little more knowledgeable than the average man in the street) when I published a post on this very blog titled “Can new luddites smash robots in anger?”. Back then and before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it was trustworthy to believe robots, automation and Artificial Intelligence would take over the simple, repetitive and mundane tasks.

In 2021, amidst the pandemic, I slightly corrected the analysis with another post titled “No Luddites, virus instead”, acknowledging that the rise of robots did not happen but could be welcome if humans are kept away for a long period of time from their jobs by the lockdowns. Hence my other post “Humanless factories may be a good thing after all”.

Today (January 2023) humans learned to live (or die…) with the virus around, robots are still not taking over and Luddites won a round without even having to compete.