Technological unemployment

Technological unemployment is job loss caused when technological change replaces workers faster than new work absorbs them. It can occur even as technology raises productivity and creates new kinds of work.

Labor-saving technology: Technology that reduces the human labor required to produce goods or services. It displaces workers when firms use it to perform tasks they previously did.
Luddite movement: A British workers' movement that destroyed textile machinery in protest during the early nineteenth century. Its protests made machinery's threat to workers a lasting public controversy.
Technological change: The development and adoption of new or improved techniques, tools, and production processes. It includes changes that improve work without necessarily eliminating jobs.
Income inequality: The unequal distribution of income among individuals or groups in a population. Displacement can weaken earnings for affected workers while gains accrue elsewhere.
Automation: The use of control systems or machines to perform tasks with reduced human intervention. It replaces particular tasks, sometimes removing the need for entire jobs.
David Ricardo: A British political economist who developed influential theories of rent, wages, and international trade. He revised his view after considering how machinery could reduce labor demand.
Creative destruction: The process by which innovation displaces established products, firms, or industries while creating new ones. It describes the broader economic turnover that can accompany technological job loss.
Wage polarization: A labor-market pattern in which employment and wages grow at the high and low ends while middle jobs shrink. Automation can erode routine middle-skill work and alter the wage structure.
Labor market: The system through which workers offer labor and employers seek to hire them. Displacement becomes unemployment when affected workers cannot find available jobs.
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation: David Ricardo's 1817 book on political economy, including theories of distribution and economic growth. Its later editions contain an early analysis of machinery displacing labor.

Linked from 22 pages