Many of the new jobs in the new economy — like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers — interface to the digital world, filling in a critical gap at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the march of Moore’s Law.
A couple interviews just came out: this one with Connie Loizos: http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/28/brainiac-steve-juvertson-on-dfj-elon-musk-and-the-growing-divide-between-rich-and-poor/ and MIT Tech Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/541571/on-the-edge-of-automation/ with more details on the ephemeral edge of automation.
(In the TechCrunch interview, I glossed over an important point about serfdom and slavery: I don’t advocate it because it is inhumane (obviously), and one day we may expand our view of inhumane employment (think of repetitive physical labor). I meant to add a rejoinder that in the future, slavery for physical labor will thankfully no longer be cost effective, as robots will do those tasks more cheaply, removing demand from the equation.)
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