AI and robots might cause mass unemployment
Agree:
Barack Obama Former President of United States of America
The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete.
Bill Gates Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there’s quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years [will go away].
Elon Musk Founder of SpaceX, cofounder of Tesla, SolarCity & PayPal
What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.
Stephen Hawking British physicist
the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.
Yuval Noah Harari Israeli historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Most people tend to overestimate human beings. In order to replace most humans, the AI won't have to do very spectacular things. Most of the things the political and economic system needs from human beings are actually quite simple. We earlier talked about driving a taxi or diagnosing a disease. This is something that AI will soon be able to do better than humans even without consciousness, even w... See More
Executive Office of the President of the United States
less educated workers are more likely to be replaced by automation than highly educated ones... The skills in which humans have maintained a comparative advantage are likely to erode over time as AI and new technologies become more sophisticated.
Joel Mokyr
I don’t see an easy way of solving it [mass unemployment]. It’s an inevitable consequence of technological progress.
Andrew McAfee Curious about the impact of technology. Co-author of "The Second Machine Age" and "Machine | P
As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.
Kevin Drum American journalist
It’s possible, of course, that a few jobs will still be left for humans: legislators, CEOs, a few artists, who knows? But this is just nitpicking. If 1 percent of the jobs stay around—or even 10 percent or 20 percent—we still have mass unemployment on our hands.Disagree:
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist
If all you think about are the jobs today and you project forward, there might be a day where robots take over every single job we have today. Is that the future that will come? No, because we have innovative people – well, I like to think we have innovative people in society – and we invent new things all the time, that require new jobs to manage them, to invent them, to conceive them, to enginee... See More
United Nations International organization
Throughout history, technological innovations have enhanced the productivity of workers and created new products and markets, thereby generating new jobs in the economy. This will be no different for AI, 3D printing and robotics.
Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman & former CEO, Google
We have to make them [workers] more productive through automation, through tools. So I'm convinced that there is in fact going to be a jobs shortage. There is going to be jobs that are unfulfilled, and that the way we'll fill them is to take people plus computers, and the computers will make people smarter. If you make the people smarter, their wages go up. They don't go down, and the number of jo... See More
Jeff Bezos Amazon, Blue Origin, Washington Post
And then the jobless.... Is AI going to put everybody out of work? I am not worried about this. I find that people, all of us, I include myself, we are so unimaginative about what future jobs are going to look like and what they are going to be. Humans like to do things and we like to be productive and we will figure out things to do and we will use these tools to make ourselves more powerful. Wha... See More
Ray Kurzweil Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist
We are going to have new types of jobs creating new types of dollars that don’t exist yet and that has been the trend. We will be creating more profound music, literature, science, technology.
Fred Baker Internet pioneer
My observation of advances in automation has been that they change jobs, but they don’t reduce them. A car that can guide itself on a striped street has more difficulty with an unstriped street, for example, and any automated system can handle events that it is designed for, but not events (such as a child chasing a ball into a street) for which it is not designed. Yes, I expect a lot of change. I... See More
Jonathan Grudin Computer science researcher
Technology will continue to disrupt jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created. When the world population was a few hundred million people there were hundreds of millions of jobs. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change.
Jeff Immelt Former Chairman of @GeneralElectric, the world’s digital industrial company. Father. Golfer. D
There's 330,000 people that work for GE and none of them had a productive day yesterday, none of them had a completely productive day. So my own belief is that when it comes to digital tools and things like that, that first part of the revolution, is going to be to make your existing workforce productive.
Amy Webb Quantitative Futurist. Finding and mapping the impact of tech trends at @FTI. Prof @NYUStern.
There is a general concern that the robots are taking over. I disagree that our emerging technologies will permanently displace most of the workforce, though I’d argue that jobs will shift into other sectors. Now more than ever, an army of talented coders is needed to help our technology advance. But we will still need folks to do packaging, assembly, sales, and outreach. The collar of the future ... See More
