Throughout history technological advancement and automation always made jobs redundant.
When humankind came up with agriculture the hunters and gatherer of the time were essentially out of a job - a lot more food could be produced by a lot less people.
This of course allowed those people to do something else as the basic need for food was covered and this continues in similar patterns throughout history until today...well, minus a few hundred years in the middle ages.
So can we just look back in history and assume it's gonna be the same story and we just need to adopt to find a new job?
I don't think we can make it ourselves that easy. This time it seems to be a little different.
AI and machine learning is already looking at how humans are doing things to do them better and more efficient to ultimately replace humans everywhere. If you think your job is safe, think again.
There are already AIs writing news article, some articles here on steem might be written by AI instead of humans already.
Pretty much every industry is attacked by AI, there are creative paintings being created by AI already. We are talking about the present here.
Interestingly enough while the people that create those AIs don't actually know how there creations work. Sure, they know what happened on a brought level but the details, how they got to a particular solution is more often than not unknown. This is actually a huge problem, especially with neural networks, as they are more or less a blackbox and if they don't give the result you want it ends up being tweaking parameters without actually knowing to 100% what's happening.
So, what do we do?
Easy solution, we just ban automation and AI - right?
No, of course not. I've been overly pessimistic in this post so far but I'm personally actually extremely excited by the opportunities ahead.
In the next part I want to talk about that. Why I believe the best time for humanity lies ahead and why I think the phrase "Robots destroying more jobs" is a good thing!
Where are you standing? Afraid or excited?
