Via TCS Daily:
What kinds of jobs would survive? Two kinds, I think. The obvious kinds are those needing the human touch…I suspect that a lot of jobs that could theoretically be taken by machines won’t be, because people will still prefer the human version…But how many of those jobs will there be?
The other kind of job is more significant, and more likely to survive: the kind of job that hasn’t been invented yet…Despite the fact that no linotype operators are employed in the production of this column, it’s not really true that unemployment has resulted from the introduction of new communications technologies. Jobs don’t so much disappear as they change.
Points:
- “[According toe Robert Reich] In
- “People have fretted about automation ending employment — and ushering in an era of too much wealth and leisure — for a century. Yet, somehow, people have remained employed, and while we’re a lot richer than we used to be, a surplus of leisure isn’t a problem for most of us.”
- “…at an arbitrarily high level of technology, everything can be done better by machines than by people. By that point, however, I suspect that people will be adopting some machine characteristics of their own: uploaded minds, computer-chip implants, etc., even as machines become more human-like, making the whole man/machine distinction somewhat beside the point.”