IT efficiency's dark side

"We have a system whereby corporations have been able to achieve a level of productivity they had before the recession even with 8.8 percent unemployment. They managed to achieve prosperity without anyone else having any prosperity."
- Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute.

Since computers have been around in business, what has their ultimate purpose always been? I've said before that it's to give companies a competitive advantage but that is done through increased efficiency which has an effect. When a robot does your job, who needs you?

So now business IT systems have continued to automate more and more jobs, and simplify more and more tasks, and the effect has creeped into the market like a building pressure. Businesses found little need to replace positions they eliminated or reductions they made because IT systems once again played a role in process automation to a point where vanishing jobs let companies start feeling unrealized benefits and potential of their current IT systems.
With their jobs at risk, more and more IT managers began searching for ways to increase efficiency and justify themselves so naturally that led to even more rapid expansion of IT projects and demonstrations of ways to use the current software investments even more efficiently.

The result? You see continued investment in the IT sector fueled by large corporate profits but you don't see these same companies adding very many jobs here.

So I guess there's a dark side to our technology systems we are dealing with. It's a contributor, but only in so much as the human innovation coming from the most motivated people and isn't that how history tends to work anyway?