Will The Future Have Jobs?

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 Technological Unemployment

Writing on his blog, futurist and entrepreneur Nigel Cameron relates five stories that make him worry about whether the future has jobs.

W riting on his blog, Nigel Cameron writes of five recent experiences that make this future-looking entrepreneur wonder whether there will be any jobs created by upcoming innovations.

First off, Cameron writes that on a recent trip to Silicon Valley, the topic of conversation revolved around, "When are we going to come up with innovations that create jobs rather than destroy them?"

Next, Cameron references Marshall Brain's 2008 presentation at the Singularity Summit, where he spoke of the coming mass unemployment that will be created by robots and automation.   At the end of his presentation, Brain was heckled, but now Cameron is beginning to consider the validity of the hypothesis.

Third, Japan's push to provide care-giving robots to their expanding senior-citizen population was recalled.  (Europe is also engaged in such a program).

Next,  Cameron relates that a top US official of the Dept of Labor assured him there was no-one on the team focused on the AI/human robotics/employment issue.


Finally, he also found there was nobody in labour's AFL/CIO examining the issue either.

According to Cameron:

I know that disruptions have happened before, though the nature of our Moore’s Law experience is that they are now getting very fast and disruptive at increasingly fundamental levels (reflect on the rapidity with which such smart enterprises as RIM and Nokia have come close to collapse). I do not know how fast our economy can innovate its way into the development of huge slews of jobs which have been taken out, class by class, through the advance of digital into the higher echelons of AI and robotics. 

What I do know are three things: This issue is huge. Almost entirely unexamined. And urgent.

Cameron is the Chairman of Strategic Futures, LLC (Chicago, Illinois) and President of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET, Washington, DC), Nigel Cameron has extensive experience leading high-level conversations focused on the future that cross disciplinary lines and bring together participants with diverse opinions and backgrounds.

SOURCE  FutureofBiz.org

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