You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot - and Sooner Than You Think

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 29, 2017 at 9:23:49 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot - and Sooner Than You Think
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]
>
> You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think
> Automation helped bring on the age of Trump. What will AI bring?
> By KEVIN DRUM
> Nov/Dec 2017 Issue
> <http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/you-will-lose-your-job-to-a-robot-and-sooner-than-you-think/>
>
> I want to tell you straight off what this story is about: Sometime in the next 40 years, robots are going to take 
> your job.
>
> I don’t care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a robot will dig them better. If you’re a magazine writer, a robot 
> will write your articles better. If you’re a doctor, IBM’s Watson will no longer “assist” you in finding the right 
> diagnosis from its database of millions of case studies and journal articles. It will just be a better doctor than 
> you.
>
> And CEOs? Sorry. Robots will run companies better than you do. Artistic types? Robots will paint and write and sculpt 
> better than you. Think you have social skills that no robot can match? Yes, they can. Within 20 years, maybe half of 
> you will be out of jobs. A couple of decades after that, most of the rest of you will be out of jobs.
>
> In one sense, this all sounds great. Let the robots have the damn jobs! No more dragging yourself out of bed at 6 
> a.m. or spending long days on your feet. We’ll be free to read or write poetry or play video games or whatever we 
> want to do. And a century from now, this is most likely how things will turn out. Humanity will enter a golden age.
>
> But what about 20 years from now? Or 30? We won’t all be out of jobs by then, but a lot of us will—and it will be no 
> golden age. Until we figure out how to fairly distribute the fruits of robot labor, it will be an era of mass 
> joblessness and mass poverty. Working-class job losses played a big role in the 2016 election, and if we don’t want a 
> long succession of demagogues blustering their way into office because machines are taking away people’s livelihoods, 
> this needs to change, and fast. Along with global warming, the transition to a workless future is the biggest 
> challenge by far that progressive politics—not to mention all of humanity—faces. And yet it’s barely on our radar.
>
> That’s kind of a buzzkill, isn’t it? Luckily, it’s traditional that stories about difficult or technical subjects 
> open with an entertaining or provocative anecdote. The idea is that this allows readers to ease slowly into daunting 
> material. So here’s one for you: Last year at Christmas, I was over at my mother’s house and mentioned that I had 
> recently read an article about Google Translate. It turns out that a few weeks previously, without telling anyone, 
> Google had switched over to a new machine-learning algorithm. Almost overnight, the quality of its translations 
> skyrocketed. I had noticed some improvement myself but had chalked it up to the usual incremental progress these 
> kinds of things go through. I hadn’t realized it was due to a quantum leap in software.
>
> But if Google’s translation algorithm was better, did that mean its voice recognition was better too? And its ability 
> to answer queries? Hmm. How could we test that? We decided to open presents instead of cogitating over this.
>
> But after that was over, the subject of erasers somehow came up. Which ones are best? Clear? Black? Traditional pink? 
> Come to think of it, why are erasers traditionally pink? “I’ll ask Google!” I told everyone. So I pulled out my phone 
> and said, “Why are erasers pink?” Half a second later, Google told me.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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