“Will there be enough work for everyone in a few years? »

HASFred Sawy (1898-1980)French economist, sociologist and demographer, famous among other things for the theory of spillage presented in his work. Machines and unemployment. Technical Progress and Employment (Dunod, 1980). According to this theory, the active population of the primary sector, agriculture, is historically displaced (is “pour”he says) to the secondary sector, industry, then to the tertiary sector, services.

This “spill” is the effect of the productivity gains produced by technological progress and mechanization that first affected agriculture in the late 18th century.^E Century labor power is replaced by machines (faster, more powerful, more productive), which makes it possible to increase the agricultural yield and therefore the amount of harvest.

Productivity gains will make it possible to lower prices, increase wages and profits, and increase the purchasing power of consumers, who will be able to shift their consumption towards purchasing household appliances, clothing, travel, and therefore industrial products. .

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Peasants leave the farms for the city (as jobs become scarcer) and work in the factories that flourish due to the Industrial Revolution. Hence there was a flow of agricultural labor to the secondary sector, which was the cradle of Fordism.

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Then there was a shift from industrial jobs to services from the mid-1970s, when the tertiaryization of the economy gained momentum. Here again, jobs are being destroyed in industries, especially low-skilled jobs. On the other hand, the new jobs created are always more qualified because they are accompanied by technological progress: the need for jobs for maintenance and the evolution of mechanization, jobs for controlling, organizing and monitoring machines, jobs in IT and network management…

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Sauvy clarifies, however, because there are obstacles to dumping “Jobs created are not equal in nature or number to jobs destroyed”

Which creates the problem of retraining workers who are victims of technological progress.

However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) today “chills” Sauvy’s optimistic thesis, according to which jobs destroyed by technical progress give rise to new, better-qualified jobs. And this for four reasons.

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