They Took Our Jobs
Well, here we have a new take on a perennial issue – well maybe not perennial, per se, but whatever the special word for “every 5-10 years” is. You see, technology A, B, or C has, throughout the industrialized age, endlessly absconded with human jobs. Damn! But even though the world is continually getting better, there’s always a cryer coming around to say “No, this time it’s for real, y’all – we’re hosed!”
Join ‘Em
The current version is a new ebook (irony purely coincidence?) by these guys Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – and they are arguing that THIS time the machines mean business! Heh, heh. Heh. Okay – but really. You know, Excel put a bunch of accountants on unemployment, but the world needed fewer people who like working as accountants anyway.
So, is this book just the latest version of a call to put wooden shoes into the gears of the machine, or is their message more of a call for further development of the human/machine cooperative workforce?
None of these questions are as interesting to me as the possibility of IBM’s Watson, Fujitsu’s K Computer, and China’s Tianhe-1 forming a union.
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS POST:
Erik Brynjolfsson’s & Andrew McAfee’s
“Race Against the Machine”
is available at Anthrobotic’s Amazon!
