We’re faced with a conundrum. On the one hand, automation seems to be threatening a large fraction of the workforce. On the other, the better the technologies get, the more jobs there seem to be. What is going on? There are a few possible explanations. The first is that automation is perhaps much harder than it seems – for all the talk of an imminent robot world, we’re actually at a fairly early stage in the automation process. Although technologies are improving, many are taking longer than expected to become superhuman. Exponential processes take time to marinate.
