AI and robots might cause mass unemployment
Agree:
Lawrence Summers Economist and Harvard University Professor
It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.
Jane Fraser Writer in Gower. #HayWritersAtWork 2018. 2nd Fish Memoir 2018. Finalist Manchester Fiction Pri
We are expecting 500 billion objects to become connected to the Internet, and this automation is going to hollow out middle and working class jobs.
Bart Selman Computer scientist at Cornell University
A person complemented with an intelligent system can write maybe ten times as much code, maybe a hundred times as much code. The problem then becomes you need a hundred times fewer human programmers.
Moshe Vardi AI and Automation Expert With 30 Yrs Experience
We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? A typical answer is that we will be free to pursue leisure activities. [But] I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. I believe that work i... See More
Jeremy Corbyn British labour party politician
We need urgently to face the challenge of automation, robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant.
Joel Mokyr
I don’t see an easy way of solving it [mass unemployment]. It’s an inevitable consequence of technological progress.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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
Toby Walsh Professor of artificial intelligence
Even if we have as many as 47% of jobs automated, this won’t translate into 47% unemployment. One reason is that we might just work a shorter week. That was the case in the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, many worked 60 hours per week. After the Industrial Revolution, work reduced to around 40 hours per week. The same could happen with the unfolding AI Revolution.
David Autor Economist
It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether automation will affect jobs. Yes, 100 percent of jobs will be affected. Jobs change all of the time. The content of jobs will change. But it’s not as if there’s a fixed amount of work to do. The net number of jobs is rising. Job tasks are changing. In many cases that automation is complementary to the tasks that people do. For example, doctors’ work i... See More
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
