As the Guardian recently reported, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, and the new jobs it has created have been of higher quality. Technology eliminated many difficult, tedious, and dangerous jobs, but this has been more than offset by a rise in the caring professions and in creative and knowledge-intensive jobs, resulting in a net increase in jobs.  The sectors to lose the most jobs have been agriculture and manufacturing, which are both difficult and dangerous, while work opportunities in medicine, education, welfare, and professional services have become more abundant. (For example, there are more teachers per student, improving student-teacher ratios, and there are also more physicians per person than in the past).

In 1980, almost a quarter of the world’s employment was still in agriculture. Now, only around 15% of the world’s workers are engaged in agricultural labor. Yet we are feeding more people, undernourishment is at an all-time low, and food is becoming less expensive. Technological advances liberated humanity from toiling in fields by mechanizing many processes and boosting productivity, allowing more food to be produced per hectare of land, and freeing hundreds of millions of people to pursue less grueling work.

The elimination of so many unsafe jobs in manufacturing and agriculture means fewer worker deaths. According to data from the International Labor Organization, from 2003 to 2013, the number of work fatalities in the world decreased by 61% (i.e., over 20,500 fewer deaths). This occurred even as the world population grew by over 700 million over the same time period. If the most dangerous thing you have to face at work is the threat of a paper cut, you quite possibly have technological innovation to thank for that.

Even if in the future robots steal some jobs, advancing technology will likely make several higher-quality jobs available for every job lost. As the Guardian article cited earlier says, technology has proven to be a “great job-creating machine,” eliminating toilsome work but bringing into existence more—and better—opportunities than it takes away.

But note that behind every machine, there lurks human ingenuity. As Matt Ridley wrote in his book The Rational Optimist:

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It does so through innovation driven often by the market.

Learn more about what market-driven technological innovation has done to improve the state of humanity at HumanProgress.org.

China is implementing its “toughest-ever” mobile phone real-name registration system, according to the Want China Times. The effort seeks to get all remaining unregistered mobile phones associated with the true identities of their owners in the records of telecommunications firms. Those who do not register their phones will soon see their telecommunications restricted.

This policy will have wonderful security benefits. It will make identity fraud, anonymous communication, and various conspiracies much easier to detect and punish—including conspiracies to dissent from government policy.

The United States is a very different place from China—on the same tracking-and-control continuum. We have no official policy of registering phones to their owners, but in practice phone companies collect our Social Security numbers when we initiate service, they know our home addresses, and they have our credit card numbers. All of these are functional unique identifiers, and there is some evidence that the government can readily access data held by our telecommunications firms.

We have no national ID that would be used for phone registration, of course. The Department of Homeland Security says it will begin denying travel rights to people from states that do not comply with the REAL ID Act beginning in 2016.

As the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations enter their final stage, one issue remaining to be resolved concerns rules of origin for automobiles.  Rules of origin determine how much of a product needs to be made within the free trade area in order for it to receive duty-free treatment.  This is a tricky issue for automobiles because automakers rely heavily on global value chains where different parts are made in different countries.

Japan wants very liberal rules of origin because its industry’s supply chains include non-TPP countries like Thailand. Canada and Mexico want very strict rules of origin, because their industries benefit from preferential access to the U.S. market through the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Canada and Mexico’s position in the TPP talks is protectionist. It’s also a consequence of negotiating trade liberalization through regional agreements. In the same way that industries who benefit from protectionism oppose the reduction of trade barriers, industries that benefit from preferential access through trade agreements oppose the reduction of other trade barriers.

Auto manufacturing investment in Canada and Mexico is driven in part by the fact that Canadian and Mexican content make it easier to import into the United States duty free under NAFTA.  If the United States drops trade barriers with other countries, Canada and Mexico become relatively less attractive places to invest.  Tight rules of origin in the TPP would reinforce Canada and Mexico’s advantage.

If negotiations at the World Trade Organization continue to flounder and regional agreements like the TPP proliferate, rules of origin will become a larger and larger problem for global trade.