This Ted Talk by Andrew Mcafee is supercalifragilisticexpialidociously optimistic about jobs:
There are four existential wicked problems of increasing danger facing the World:
1)Man made climate change that demands wrenching alterations in how energy is produced and used worldwide;
2)Income inequality growing at exponential rates in both developed and developing countries. The ever more concentrated wealth concentrated in the elite 1% is undermining basic political processes within and between countries worldwide;
3)Long festering religious strife that fosters increasingly violent and widespread slaughters of “infidels”;
4)the increasing scarcity of jobs as AI and automation move ever higher in the job hierarchy taking over not just blue color manual jobs but now white collar knowledge jobs in service, analysis and decisionmaking. These loss of jobs are not being replaced by new and better jobs but rather few and poorer paying positions. Unemployment rates and schooling debts among youth now reach into every continent and at alarming levels. This lack of employment and opportunity for betterment permeates all societies and feeds Wicked Problems 2) and 3).
Now tell me again why we should not prepare for Lack of Jobs Becoming the Tipping Point to International Crises? And just when Government needs to formulate a very intelligent response to the problem – the GOP has destroyed the workings of government. Just like the GOP’s Starve the Beast Policy initiated by Ronald Reagan which was designed to create deliberate and massive deficits so across the board cutbacks would have to be made to everything but tax relief for the wealthy and defense spending. Now the new focus by the TeaParty and Senator McConnell is to sabotage government elective and legislative processes so “we have proof that government is not working” and we can force our agenda. So 6 more years and counting of bitter, divisive, and partisan politics [the very things the electorate wanted to eliminate back in 2006 and 2008] means government will be ill-prepared to cope with the coming Massive Job Drought. And the Executive Suite embraces the Job Drought because they can reduce their marginal wages costs to zero. Wow, sounds like the recipe for economic and social disaster.
References:
Crains – A third of the $3trillion knowledge worker economy is up for grabs by AI substitutes.
TechRepublic – AI taking away more jobs than it creates
Pew Research – some very educated projections on the state of the IT + AI art to 2025
Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford – Silicon Valley expert’s dire warning
Shadow Work by Craig Lambert – the unpaid, unseen work left after AI takes over
The Second Machine Age by Byrnjolfsson and McAfee – states the job-technology problem but no help
Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford – First look at AI+Computing automating away knowledge jobs
Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin – economic implications of production revolution
Race Against the Machine by Byrnjolfsson – First look at the 2nd machine age
No Ordinary Disruption by Dobbs et alia – another Pollyanna look at the problem