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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case. Someone has to make and service all these advanced devices.
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
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.
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
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
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.