The Technological Singularity

by Murray Shanahan

In short, the total amount of paid work that developed economies require humans to do is likely to decrease substantially. If this happens, things could go a number of ways. On the one hand, we might see a more divided society in which the most lucrative work is carried out by a small subset of the population. This highly educated and highly creative elite would buck the trend by pursuing the few remaining occupations where humans still outperform machines, such as entrepreneurship or a creative vocation. The remainder of the population would be out of work. But their basic needs would be more than met. Indeed this is likely to be a time of abundance, with an ever-increasing variety of goods and services available even to the economically less empowered.