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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Obsolete jobs.
Message-ID: <21984@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 20-Feb-85 18:57:21 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.21984
Posted: Wed Feb 20 18:57:21 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Feb-85 04:40:56 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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at the person will be unemployable?  If people were
automata which were built for only one task, then this would be true.
But people are flexible things, and can be retrained to do other work
that has not been automated yet.  In Japan, companies retrain their
own employees who were displaced by automation.  This is not some
inscrutable Japanese tradition which has survived the centuries, the
American occupation forces put this constraint on Japanese companies.
I don't know if this practice still has the force of law in Japan, but
the companies still follow it.

J. Giles