I believe that a rapid shift to automation is something that should be keeping politicians and economists up at night. Technological change has always happened but we’re on the cusp of a time where million of, say, fast food jobs could be eliminated en masse.
If you’ve been hanging around here then surely you’ve heard that idea before but it’s clearly going mainstream. Professors from several top universities were invited to speak at the Financial Times’ Camp Alphaville event and said robots will take about half of the jobs worldwide in the not-too-distant future.
“We are now in the second machine age where robots take on mental, as well as physical work, which does encroach on a vast number of jobs,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. “Robots now substitute jobs, not just complement them from previous times.”
The idea definitely has Wall Street’s interest and that could mean mass investments and a push to quickly implement automation technology.
