In his TED talks speech, "Are droids taking our jobs?", Andrew McAfee puts together an extremely convincing argument as to why automated machines are going to drastically reduce the size of the work force, and a slightly less convincing argument about why that's a good thing.
The first part of his speech completely won me over, he provided a ton of extremely convincing examples of how things that people do are already being phased out by computers. Like how Ken Jennings, the winner of 74 straight episodes of the game show Jeopardy was completely demolished in a game against "watson" the Jeopardy playing super-computer. Or how Siri, the "personal assistant" many of you have installed in your I-phones is incredibly useful, even if it isn't perfect. He makes the point that these technologies can only improve, and are improving incredibly quickly. I can only think of more examples that further his point, technologies like the kindle are quickly phasing out a large portion of book sales, and with that they're making many of the jobs associated with the production and distribution of books unnecessary. It becomes pretty obvious that in 20 years droids are going to be doing a lot of the work that we're doing now.
The question then becomes about whether or not this is going to be a good thing. Andrew is convinced that it'll help just about everyone. His reasoning behind this is from parallels he drew to the industrial revolution. After the stream engine was invented, the increased efficiency led to an increased standard of living all across the planet. He thinks that the increased productivity we'll be able to get out of autonomous machines will just free up time for people to do other things. I'm a little bit more skeptical though. I don't have any doubt that the increased efficiency will be a great help to anyone who is benefiting from lowered prices, or is part of a booming programming industry, but Andrew avoids the big question here, what about the people who lose their jobs? This emerging technology could make entire fields pretty much useless, what will translators do when their years of education have been made all but useless because of Google translate? I think we will probably see the same thing we saw during the industrial revolution, more money going towards the wealthy. Overall we might become more productive, but with all of the benefits going towards their owners rather than the people who have lost their jobs.
