Via The New Yorker:
Slowly, but surely, robots (and virtual ’bots that exist only as software) are taking over our jobs; according to one back-of-the-envelope projection, in ninety years “70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” Should we be worried?
Points:
- “Kevin Kelly, “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, and source for the above guestimate, says we shouldn’t. Instead, argues Kelly, in a Utopian piece titled “Better than Human,” we should welcome our new robot overlords.”
- “…over the last decade throughout the economy, there has been a drop in the employment-to-population ratio and a drop in median wages, and many of the people who lost jobs couldn’t find new ones that paid as well as the ones that they lost.”
- “But there is no causal mechanism, physical, economic, sociological, or legal, that guarantees that new jobs will always come into existence.”
- “Anything that can be automated will, but where we can create new things, there still may be a niche for us to fill.”
Books and authors mentioned in the article (print and electronic formats):
