The Future of Work or How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect Us in 20 years (0)

The Future of Work
Automation anxiety has been spreading lately. What's clear is that there will be significant change. What's less clear is what that change will look like. The threat of technological unemployment is real.
A picture that we see on our television screens, in everyday commentary is one where an army of robots descend on the workplace with one goal in mind: to displace humans from their work.
Yes, machines displace humans from particular tasks, but they don't just substitute for humans. They also complement them in other tasks.
Sometimes they complement humans directly. So a taxi driver can use a satnav system to navigate on unfamiliar roads.
It also complements humans indirectly and it does this in two ways .
Think the economy as a pie. Technological progress makes the pie bigger. As productivity increases , incomes rise and demand grows. People displaced from the tasks in the old pie could find tasks to do in the new pie instead.
But technological progress doesn't just make the pie bigger. It also changes the ingredients in the pie. As time passes, people spend their incomes in different ways. New industries are created and new tasks have to be done .
Itś often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, are committing something known as the lump of labor fallacy. Now the problem is that the lump of labor fallacy is itself a fallacy.
Imagine a dock worker who had begun to use a machine to make washers, the small metal discs that fasten on the end of screws. And this dock worker felt guilty for being more productive. Asked why, he said “I know I'm doing wrong . I'm taking away the work of another man.” In his mind there was some fixed lump of work to be divided up between him and his pals.
But the lump of work wasn't fixed. As this worker used the machine and become more productive, the price of washers would fall, demand for washers would rise, more washers would have to be made and there'd be more work for his pals to do. The lump of work would get bigger. Its called the lump of labor fallacy.
And today you hear the people talk about the lump of labor fallacy to think about the future of all types of work. There's no fixed lump of work out there to be divided up between people and machines. Yes, machines substitute for humans making the original lump of work smaller, but they also complement humans, and the lump of work gets bigger and changes.
But hereś the mistake itś right to think that technologigal progress makes the lump of work to be done bigger. But it's wrong to think that necessarily, humans will be placed to perform those tasks. As machines become more capable, it's likely that theyĺl take on the extra lump of work themselves.
Machines perform tasks differently to humans. What humans are currently capable of doing dosen't represent any sort of summit in what machines might be capable of doing in the future.
For most of human history one ecomomic problem has dominated: how to make the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on.
Go back to the turn of the first century AD, and if you took the global economic pie, and divided it up into equal slices for everyone in the world, everyone would get a few hundred dollars. And if you rolled forward a thousand years, roughly the same is true. But in the last few hundred years, economic growth has taken off. Those economic pies have exploded in size. The value of those individual slices of the pie today, the're about 10,150 dollars. If economic growth continues at two percent our children will be twice as rich as us. By in large, we've solved the traditional economic problem.
With that solved problem has arosed antoher one how to make sure that everbody gets a slice. Solving this problem won't be easy .