Are robots going to steal your job? Probably | Moshe Y Vardi
Excerpt:
Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over release or unveil – or even create – demand for new human jobs?
The debate has flared up again recently because of technological achievements such as deep learning, which recently enabled a Google software program called AlphaGo to beat Go world champion Lee Sedol, a task considered even harder than beating the world’s chess champions.
Ultimately, the question boils down to this: are today’s modern technological innovations like those of the past, which made obsolete the job of buggy maker, but created the job of automobile manufacturer? Or is there something about today that is markedly different?
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2006 book The Tipping Point highlighted what he called “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”. Can we really be confident that we are not approaching a tipping point, a phase transition – that we are not mistaking the trend of technology both destroying and creating jobs for a law that it will always continue this way?
More at site
Excerpt:
Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over release or unveil – or even create – demand for new human jobs?
The debate has flared up again recently because of technological achievements such as deep learning, which recently enabled a Google software program called AlphaGo to beat Go world champion Lee Sedol, a task considered even harder than beating the world’s chess champions.
Ultimately, the question boils down to this: are today’s modern technological innovations like those of the past, which made obsolete the job of buggy maker, but created the job of automobile manufacturer? Or is there something about today that is markedly different?
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2006 book The Tipping Point highlighted what he called “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”. Can we really be confident that we are not approaching a tipping point, a phase transition – that we are not mistaking the trend of technology both destroying and creating jobs for a law that it will always continue this way?
More at site