THE better artificial intelligence gets, the greater the popular concern that smart machines will soon usher in a labour-market catastrophe. In Chandler, Arizona, Americans can at this moment hail a ride from a car without a human at the wheel. Web users can read high-quality, instant translations of foreign-language newspapers—no professional translation service needed. And developers of machine-learning technologies are moving rapidly to apply their tools across a vast array of medical tasks.
Despite this, economists, with rare exceptions, are relatively sanguine about the possible labour-market effects of AI. Technological change always raises fears of mass unemployment, after all, and yet there are more people working worldwide than ever. Count me among those who reckon this approach is a bit too dismissive of the threat. On the one hand, while the very broad story of technological progress over the past two centuries has been one in which employment has grown massively, across...Continue reading
from Business and finance http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/11/job-stealing-robots?fsrc=rss
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