Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford

The unfortunate reality is that a great many people will do everything right—at least in terms of pursuing higher education and acquiring skills—and yet will still fail to find a solid foothold in the new economy.

Jobs remain the primary mechanism by which purchasing power gets into the hands of consumers. If that mechanism continues to erode, we will face the prospect of having too few viable consumers to continue driving economic growth in our mass-market economy.

Indeed, the frightening reality is that if we don’t recognize and adapt to the implications of advancing technology, we may face the prospect of a “perfect storm” where the impacts from soaring inequality, technological unemployment, and climate change unfold roughly in parallel, and in some ways amplify and reinforce each other.

Add in political dysfunction due to increasing partisanship in a zero-sum economy, plus terrorism, the graying of the population, and maybe more.

The total value of imports from China amounted to less than 3 percent of US consumer spending.

YouTube was founded in 2005 by three people. Less than two years later, the company was purchased by Google for about $1.65 billion. At the time of its acquisition, YouTube employed a mere sixty-five people, the majority of them highly skilled engineers. That works out to a valuation of over $25 million per employee. In April 2012, Facebook acquired photo-sharing start-up Instagram for $1 billion. The company employed thirteen people. That’s roughly $77 million per worker. Fast-forward another two years to February 2014 and Facebook once again stepped up to the plate, this time purchasing mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had a workforce of fifty-five—giving it a valuation of a staggering $345 million per employee.

Indeed, outside the realm of science fiction, all functional artificial intelligence technology is, in fact, narrow AI.

A thinking machine would, of course, continue to enjoy all the advantages that computers currently have, including the ability to calculate and access information at speeds that would be incomprehensible for us.

Kurzweil is “a kook” who “knows nothing about how the brain works” and has a penchant for “making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality.”

Lol. I know quite a few people who would be angered at this, but I think it’s pretty spot-on.

The problem is that the skills ladder is not really a ladder at all: it is a pyramid, and there is only so much room at the top.

The paradox of increased cockpit automation is that, while the technology reduces the cognitive burden on pilots and almost certainly contributes to a better overall safety record, it also means that pilots spend less time actively flying the plane. In other words, they get less practice and, over time, the nearly instinctual reactions that professional pilots develop over countless hours of training can begin to degrade. Carr worries that a similar effect is likely to cascade across offices, factories, and other workplaces as automation continues its advance.

Like students not knowing multiplication tables, and how that feeds into other problems.

Changing that would require far more than an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.

The Case for a Basic Income Guarantee

where many individuals can no longer rely on traditional support systems:

Thus remains contrary to those that see "traditional support networks" as the effective structure of society.

Margaret Thatcher’s statement that “there is no such thing as society.”

Context?

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013, p. 38, http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf.

Rob Cox and Eliza Rosenbaum, “The Beneficiaries of the Downturn,” New York Times, December 28, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/business/29views.html