Are We On The Horizon of the End of Work?

 
 Economics  

Since the inception of this blog, Ray Kurzweil and Andrew McAfee (along with Erik Brynjolfsson) have been constant intellectual thought leaders for our readers.  Recently the two were interviewed on Radio Open Source.

On a recent interview on Radio Open Source, host Christopher Lydon talked to Ray Kurzweil and Andrew McAfee about the potential for a future jobless economy. This is a discussion this blog has anticipated for some time now, with two of the intellectual inspirations for 33rd Square sharing a dialog.

Along with Erik Brynjolfsson, McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT and associate director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. has written two books on the future of work and economics: Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

The conversation starts with what McAfee and Brynjolfsson call the “Great Decoupling,” the possibility that machines are beginning to destroy more jobs than they can create.

Between 2000 and 2014, the median U.S. income has actually dropped: from $55,986 to $51,017. "There is a lot of evidence that the middle class is getting hollowed out," McAfee tells Lydon.

Related articles When Robots Rule The World  Who Owns The Future?  Racing With The Machines

Over the same period corporate profits have more than doubled. The workforce participation rate in May of this year was 62.8%, the lowest since 1978. The level of investment in equipment and software bounced back to 95% of its historical peak just two years after the same recession that trashed all the jobs that have been so slow to come back.

The discussion looks at the questions about what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the "superstar" economy, with big gains at the top, and stagnation and falling back at the middle and bottom. Increasingly too, automation—mechanical and now increasingly with artificial intelligence and machine learning is replacing jobs.  This replacement rate appears to be increasing too.

As the Great Decoupling continues, the replacement of human work with machines will only accelerate, for two reasons: computers will keep getting cheaper over time and digital labor will become cheaper than human labor not only in the United States and other rich countries, but also in places like China and India.

"Off-shoring is only a way station on the road to automation," write Brynjolfsson and McAfee.

For instance, the number of American routine jobs dropped by 11 percent between 2001 and 2011. A new study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University suggest that 47% of U.S. jobs might be vulnerable to loss by automation.

As a more optimistic view, Kurzweil looks at the great potential benefits of technological growth. He comments that education and our technologies help us to be smarter, and essentially race with the machines.

"Our horizons continue to change," he says.  "We are going to continue to change by making ourselves smarter."  Enhancing our abilities with technologies is a consistent theme with Kurzweil.

"The majority of jobs today didn't exist a quarter century ago," Kurzweil reminds Lydon.  He suggests that technologies like 3D printing are allowing our jobs to be more creative.  Looking further ahead he comments that, "the economy is going to become a coexistence of propriety forms of information, and open-source forms," he says.

McAfee is not quite so optimistic.  "There are some trends that are worrying."

He suggests the technologies of Abundance will come, but the transition period may be extremely difficult for the great majority of workers. Abundance is far from being a mass phenomenon he states.  Distribution is a core issue.

"This stuff called money still has an important role in the society," says McAfee.  "how we are going to make sure people have enough of it to buy the stuff that still cost money that is going to become a more pressing issue."

"I agree that we are going to see very little and less over time absolute physical misery—starving in the streets. I do still think there are things that are expensive, and are going to continue to be expensive, in the short to medium term, and ignoring that seems a little blithe."

Kurweil's response to this is a bit simplistic in that 3D printing will make things easier and less expensive in the future for people to seek and follow their passions.  "I agree that we are going to see very little and less over time absolute physical misery—starving in the streets," replies McAfee. "I do still think there are things that are expensive, and are going to continue to be expensive, in the short to medium term, and ignoring that seems a little blithe."

McAfee totally agrees with Kurzweil when the subject turns to transhumanism.  "Our humanity is not our biology," he reiterates.


SOURCE  Radio Open Source

By 33rd Square

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