At the Race Against the Machine site, Andrew McAfee has been following employment statistics that support his and co-author Erik Brynjolfsson's contention that jobs (in the United States) are being lost to technology and automation.
McAffee has plotted the trends since 1995 in US GPD, total corporate investment in equipment, and total corporate profits from non-financial companies (and also for all companies, including financial ones). He set the January 1995 value for each of these equal to 100 to allow comparisons across them over the years.
...since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 GDP, equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are all now at their all-time highs (non-financial profits are near their historic high). The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers.
So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers. [Emphasis added]
Although more data and historical reflection will be needed to prove this out, McAfee and Brynjolfsson's work supports the ideas of others like Marshall Brain that artificial intelligence, robotics and automation will soon cause major global economic change - a part of the Technological Singularity.
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