Creative Destruction

Over to "The London Review of Books'" blog, we read about the Neoliberalization in the name of "modernisation" of the Royal Mail from someone with the improbable name of Roy Mayall. In the course of the discussion he mentions something called the Pegasus Geo-Route, which is some sort of GPS dealio, that

measures the precise distance of every walk, up and down every garden path, to every door. It tells the postal worker exactly how fast he is supposed to be walking and therefore how long each round is supposed to take.

And a

new walk-sequencing machines are made by Solystic, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, which describes itself as ‘a leading global security company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, shipbuilding and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide.’

To say nothing of the replacement of bicycles with trucks.

Recently, I mentioned that robots have taken over the diaper.com warehouse. These robots work off of some kind of a grid thingy that allows them to pick up and drop off items inside the warehouse. They are the first step in the mechanization of the pick up and drop off industry. How long until someone puts together picking up and dropping off in a discrete space with the ability of GPS dealios to aid the picking up and dropping off in a larger and unenclosed space with robots and, consequently, using robots in mail delivery? Or garbage pickup? Or UPS or FedEx?

No doubt, those whose jobs are creatively destroyed by the robots will find work busing tables, waiting tables, cooking food, and paring the bunions of the every fewer and older rich folks, whose job markets will not, thankfully, suffer from the interference of union rules and licensing.