could your job be done by a powerful computer?

yeah the subject has def begin to creep into the mainstream economics dialogue lately

krugman's article from 1996: http://mit.edu/krugman/www/BACKWRD2.html

actually predicted a lot of what's happening tho maybe was too pessimistic about robot plumbers /drivers etc.

from the other side of the fence, this hilarious article just posted

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/12/10-reasons-why-2013-will-be-the-year-you-quit-your-job/

What's the general crisis scenario look like? Because a workforce that is forced to go on half-time and still get the same real wages due to robot efficiencies seems pretty good to me.

the robot efficiencies don't go to labor, is the crisis

blame our workaholic culture; don't blame the robots!

No, & I can prove it mathematically.

I’ll alert Nick Woodhouse.

lol at the techcrunch article

This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

always felt like the entrepreneur meme was a nice way to rationalize tearing up the social contract. "ehhh, you guys are on your own now ... start, like, a business or something ... worked out for those three guys over there."

if techcrunch were replaced by a robot you can't tell me all parties involved wouldn't be better off.

St3ve Din3rman

Wow! Just this morning I was sitting here thinking , how in 50 years from now historians will look back on this time and discuss just how wrong we all were by blaming this whole problem of a dwindling middle class on political mistakes by both sides rather then the reality of what really was taking place.The fact is there has never been a better time in the past 100 years to create products and ideas, and get very wealthy doing so..The downside is those that don't realize or are unable to transition to this new world of innovation in technology and thinking are getting left behind, and thus is the reason for the continuing divide between the haves and have nots.Anyone unable to imagine and create will get left behind. Sad but true........

what's the end game if we all became entrepreneurs ... would it be a barter system? i can just imagine everyone trying to trade the useless crap they came up with in exchange for more useless crap. "uhhh i'll trade you this vibrating anime woman massage seat cushion for your 'integrated mobile social networking space'. do you have any food or medicine i could have, by the way?"

B0do H0enen

Good article. But what are your thoughts on what will happen to the 90% of the population that will not follow this advice? How can those that do make it through the end of the industrial age support those that are left behind?

J4mes Altuch3r

When the plane starts to run out of air and the oxygen masks come out you put your own mask on first before you put it on the face of your 2 year old baby. The same thing here. The best way to help everyone else is to help yourself. Then it will become a very natural instinct how you can help the rest. Don't worry about it until then.

entrepreneurialism as an apocalyptic cult. interesting times.

just have your 3d printer build a farm-bot and a medic-bot

K3lly McFinn3ly

Thank you for articulating this without economic charts and graphs. I very much need to diversify.

nothing new under the sun

http://nyrbclassics.tumblr.com/post/41215596961/the-plain-truth-is-that-at-present-many-of-us-are

http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2013/01/11/apres-le-perturbation/

I work as an admin assistant in the civil service so yes it fucking could

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4340.html

Could a powerful computer artificially inseminate goats?

NB: This is not my job at present, but I am merely curious about this in a general sort of way.

it could not naturally inseminate goats

what if they were using nanotechnology?

or if the computer was really goat hot?

na-a-a-a-anotechnology

i'll get me coat

It would have to be a very powerful computer

hahaha i met a bright-eyed young engineer at work who told me he'd come up with a logarithm that "does what you guys do"

There are a few recurrent aspects of my job that could totally be done by a script or handful of scripts and it is immensely frustrating to me that they are not. Like, that's what computers are for, surely, to do tedious repetitive tasks. It's 2013. What the fuck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html

i met a project management guru the other week who is flatly, calmly convinced that robots will replace at least 50% of the jobs people currently have and that it would have happened sooner except no one knows how to replace the lost demand

maybe we can find aliens to buy our products and let the preponderance of humanity starve