"You could afford to give people a day off, you know. Afternoons off, holidays off. If you have machines behind you."
One of the major issues I have with discussions around automation is that they always look at it from either the point of economics or the point of technology.
Those are important perspectives but we tend to look back in history to determine what will happen in the future.
If technology keeps progressing and economics keep making it cheaper and cheaper to do more then the real question is where does that really leave humans. Our advances as a species is by the invention of new technologies which has allowed us to store more and more knowledge/information/data from trial and error in the past while at the same time allowed us to spend less and less time on surviving. In other words, human ingenuity and advances are based on the technology.
What many seem to forget is that once AI learn to pick strawberries it has learned a lot of other things too which can be applied to other industries/tasks and it's instantly applicable (no need to retrain workforce). In other words each step forward isn't isolated to the area that the AI is learning about it allows for the advance of technology in a number of areas.
And so here is the problem.
Human progress has historically followed the progress of technology which was fine as long as it made many things easier. Human ingenuity helped us keep adapting and venture into new areas. But what we are increasingly facing is technological ingenuity.
One of the major issues I have with discussions around automation is that they always look at it from either the point of economics or the point of technology.
Those are important perspectives but we tend to look back in history to determine what will happen in the future.
If technology keeps progressing and economics keep making it cheaper and cheaper to do more then the real question is where does that really leave humans. Our advances as a species is by the invention of new technologies which has allowed us to store more and more knowledge/information/data from trial and error in the past while at the same time allowed us to spend less and less time on surviving. In other words, human ingenuity and advances are based on the technology.
What many seem to forget is that once AI learn to pick strawberries it has learned a lot of other things too which can be applied to other industries/tasks and it's instantly applicable (no need to retrain workforce). In other words each step forward isn't isolated to the area that the AI is learning about it allows for the advance of technology in a number of areas.
And so here is the problem.
Human progress has historically followed the progress of technology which was fine as long as it made many things easier. Human ingenuity helped us keep adapting and venture into new areas. But what we are increasingly facing is technological ingenuity.
A good example of that is: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6368815...
In other words, the one thing we had over technology doesn't even seem to be out of it's reach cause while technology is progressing we aren't.