I think there is a problem in this article in conflating the news about the coming wave of technological unemployment with "AI only" I've had the opportunity t

I think there is a problem in this article in conflating the news about the coming wave of technological unemployment with "AI only" I've had the opportunity this year to pay very close attention to the AI debate since my girlfriend is doing her masters in social policy and her focus is on technological unemployment. (and the policy implications of the same) This is an umbrella term under which AI lives under. Essentially any job which goes away to automation falls under technological unemployment. Consider the 60,000 foxconn employees http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 rendered jobless because of TEU. Their further plans to neat fully-automate http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128870/foxconn-robots-automation-apple-iphone-china-manufacturing http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/30/14128870/foxconn-robots-a... their factories. Those aren't necessarily AI but they are unemployed. The distinction isn't really that important. Now if we consider the public policy estimates of the number of jobs "at risk" of TEU in the next 5 to 10 years, we are looking at as much as 50% to 60%. One particularly interesting line in one of her papers was that the estimates were as much as 40% "unless natural language processing reaches pairity with humans in the next 5 years" ... Microsoft achieved that pairity that a few months ago. http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/18/historic-achievement-microsoft-researchers-reach-human-parity-conversational-speech-recognition/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/18/historic-achievem... Kristin Lee at the white house recently published some really interesting papaer on AI, Authomation and the social impact of it https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artificial-intelligence-automation-and-economy https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/12/20/artificial-intell... my girlfriend sent me the link with the subject "the whitehouse just stole my work!" - though it's really just parallel evolution, they're saying basically what she's coming out with too. (incidentally, if anyone reads this and has Kristin's contact info, I'd love to introduce her to my girlfriend, I think they'd be able to trade ideas) Anyways - suffice it to say - Artifical Intelligence is only "fake news" if you've got your head in the sand or you decide to creatively misinterpret the literature.