Future of Work, Part II - The Rant Edition

Last episode on the Future of Work, I described the problem –
artificial intelligence is going to potentially make a lot of
people unemployed in the near-term future; and the range of
opinions, you can kind of pick and mix from:

It’s the robot job apocalypse! Society as we know it will soon be
over!

It’s okay, we’ll just give everyone a Universal Basic Income and
they can all start small businesses or learn to code or
something.

It’s okay, we’ll just retrain everyone so that all the coal
miners are making solar panels now.

It’s okay, AI won’t replace that many people and has been greatly
exaggerated; just because a job has the potential to be
automated, doesn’t mean that it will be automated. Instead AI
will become a tool that enhances our productivity

It’s okay, AI will replace a lot of people but we’ll just come up
with new jobs. No one is smashing spinning jennys nowadays and
there aren’t thousands of unemployed loom-weavers on the streets
of Manchester because everyone moved on, got new demands, and now
they all work in PR.

As for me – I fall in the middle of the two extreme viewpoints,
the “we’re all doomed” and “it’s fine” viewpoints. Nice and
convenient, you might say. Let me explain in a rant. 


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