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by Unosolo
3400 days ago
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This time it is different because automation has reached the levels when it impacts most jobs profoundly and the remaining or newly created job require more skills and deeper specialisation at the same time. A woodworker whose job was automated cannot pick computer programming in a couple of weeks. It is just not practical. |
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My mother used to have the job title "comptometer operator". She, and rooms-full of her peers, spent all day driving tools like these: http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/operating_a_comptomet... (And they - presumably - had "disrupted" the abacus-operator industry...)
It seems to me a lot like the industry category change that woodworkers, or car assembly line workers, or buggy whip makers - all experienced.
It was only a handful of generations back when the majority of humanity spent most of their time working farms to create food. That's changed radically to where way under 1% of the workforce produces all the food - and "the rest of us" do other things (like desperately trying to get people to tap more often on our little square on their smartphone screen instead of some other little square... Or more optimistically, curing cancer or the common cold...)
I think in general, humanity is better off. The optimist in me _assumes_ we'll be better off still once the robots are doing all the physical work, and the AIs are doing all the (uninteresting) mental work. There'll still be fights over who owns "the means of production", and history will inevitably repeat the Luddite movement again and again, and "the people" will resolve the inevitability of the accumulation of wealth in the pockets of the rich - either democratically via functional government and taxation and regulation, or by revolution of the masses. (And that'll happen faster than anyone expects and it'll be spectacularly unpleasant to live through - and the pessimist in me says we may well be irretrievably on our way down that path already...)