Jed,”.. In the past, education helped because automation and robots
usually replaced unskilled labor.”
I agree it helped in the past, but currently a degree is mainly used by
personnel departments as a measure of your conformity and is little more
that what a high school diploma used to be.Technically illiterate, they
are incapable of interviewing people to detect if they have real talent.
You left out the important proviso, if there ARE jobs to fill.I’m not
sure that replacing unskilled labor will be the front runner for
long.That requires investing in expensive hardware.Highly paid
professionals are a much juicier target and software spread over many
thousands is relatively cheap.Already a lot of what you read in the
media is written by AI.Many labor intensive parts of legal work has
started to be done by AI.Someone mentioned auto scanning of X-Ray
images.A TED talk by a lady doctor demonstrated how much better the
results were for diagnosing breast cancer.Etc Etc.
Although I know it to be true I have trouble accepting just how fast
this change is and will occur.Kurzweil opened my eyes to what the future
holds for nano machines and how things will change when they become self
replicating.He talks about nanobots in the blood that can fix problems
in your brain and attack cancer for example.The only thing I’m sure of
is how difficult it is to forecast just what will happen and that our
politicians won’t be ahead of the curve.
I haven't thought much about the working week. Perhaps there is some
compromise for two people sharing a job providing they are paid enough.
The latter is the basic problem that remains unaddressed..
