Future of Work, Part II - The Rant Edition
Last episode on the Future of Work, I described the problem \u2013 artificial intelligence is going to potentially make a lot of people unemployed in the near-term future; and the range of opinions, you can kind of pick and mix from:
It\u2019s the robot job apocalypse! Society as we know it will soon be over!
It\u2019s okay, we\u2019ll just give everyone a Universal Basic Income and they can all start small businesses or learn to code or something.
It\u2019s okay, we\u2019ll just retrain everyone so that all the coal miners are making solar panels now.
It\u2019s okay, AI won\u2019t replace that many people and has been greatly exaggerated; just because a job has the potential to be automated, doesn\u2019t mean that it will be automated. Instead AI will become a tool that enhances our productivity
It\u2019s okay, AI will replace a lot of people but we\u2019ll just come up with new jobs. No one is smashing spinning jennys nowadays and there aren\u2019t thousands of unemployed loom-weavers on the streets of Manchester because everyone moved on, got new demands, and now they all work in PR.
As for me \u2013 I fall in the middle of the two extreme viewpoints, the \u201cwe\u2019re all doomed\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s fine\u201d viewpoints. Nice and convenient, you might say. Let me explain in a rant.\xa0
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