Robots to Take Your Job, But Don’t Worry
During the late 1990s business and industry began to panic over the issues surrounding Y2K, which later turned out to be mostly manufactured fear.
In the chaotic world around us, it has become increasingly difficult to separate genuine problems from manufactured fear. And it is especially difficult to make plans for the future when we can’t properly gauge the severity of a legitimate issue we know we’ll have to deal with.
As we begin to wrestle with “2 billion jobs disappearing by 2030,” clearly a subject we’ll need to deal with sooner rather than later, it’s easy to get lost in the problems instead of the solutions.
That said, gauging a proper response is not easy. On one hand, dealing with the Y2K issue will seem like child’s play compared to this kind of massive job loss. However, throwing trillions of dollars at it, as we did with the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis, may indeed be a wrongheaded overreaction.
For this reason I’d like to talk through the coming era of automation and point out some of the hopeful signs I see for the brighter future that lies ahead.