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"Destroying jobs" with technology is not a bad thing. The world benefits from cheaper products, and we shouldn't keep people working in jobs where they are no l
by fragsworth 14y ago
"Destroying jobs" with technology is not a bad thing. The world benefits from cheaper products, and we shouldn't keep people working in jobs where they are no longer needed just for the sake of letting them work. They should learn new skills, find other jobs, and contribute to society in other ways.
No company would hesitate to fire every one of their employees if they could get machines to do better work for cheaper. The only reason McDonald's hasn't done it yet is because they haven't found a cost-effective way to do it.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoThere's only so much work to do. Machines seems to be eating more jobs than innovation can create. Eventually, we will face massive (over 50%) unemployment, unless of course we change a thing or two in our way of life (such as 20 hours work weeks or such). Machines are great, but we do need to mind the way we use them.
- 3pt14159 14y agoSorta... In the short term the less intelligent half will be massively unemployed until we get something like Gattaca going and then everyone can basically be researchers (or writers, etc). The real question is what happens after the singularity.
- loup-vaillant 14y ago> The real question is what happens after the singularity. Probably more true than you realize. The most likely scenario for a technological singularity is an AI that writes a slightly more efficient AI, and so on until world domination if it's quick enough (which is likely). So we better know exactly¹ what we want the AI to do, or it might for instance tile the solar system with molecular smileys to maximize a badly programmed notion of "happiness". [1] With mathematical precision, no less.