Returning to the long arc of human history, when nobody […]

Returning to the long arc of human history, when nobody had a job.

Our book just came out. From Ch 5, which I wrote with Mohammad Islam: “Moore’s Law provides the model for us to understand humanity’s continuous compounding capacity to compute—with that we have accelerating technological progress driven by the combinatorial explosion of new ideas by ever-increasing sub-groups of cognitively diverse people becoming connected. However, the ramifications of this longer-term trend will start to become apparent in the very short term. We believe the greatest disruptor for job displacement caused by this accelerating innovation is the self-driving car.

In five years, it will be clear that the debate about the rise of the autonomous vehicle will have ended. [But…] of workers worldwide who have a paid full-time job (excluding temporary workers), almost 20 percent drive as their form of employment today!

Let’s go far enough in the future where no one will debate the sweeping transition of time. There are infinite possible paths to this distant future, but we can imagine reasonable endpoints. This future will look like much of human history prior to the industrial and agricultural revolutions, where serfs and slaves did most of the labor-intensive work in the city-state economies. But while we hope the arc of the moral universe continues to bend towards justice, there will be a new paradigm in master and slave relationship between man and machine. The slaves of the future will be our machines.

There won’t be many jobs in the sense that we think of them for most people today. Machines will take over mechanically repetitive tasks. Humans will ever only need to do this type of work if they choose to, but they will not provide the most efficient means to complete these tasks. Even highly skilled workers, such as engineers, doctors, and scientists, will have their professions disrupted by automation and artificial intelligence. We will automate engineering, we will automate diagnosis, and we will automate discovery of scientific principles. In this future, where the marginal cost of labor is zero and where companies have reached new bounds of profit maximization, both the microeconomics of individual companies and the macroeconomics of the global economy will be completely upended. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—food, shelter, health care, education—will be free for everyone forever. We won’t need to work to achieve the basic building blocks of sustainable civilization. The only important human need that will be amplified in this distant future even more than it is now is the desire for meaning.”

Full text of Ch 5: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/25286128879

Amazon opening: http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Unemployment-David-Nordfors/dp/152384583X/ with John Hagel, Vint Cerf, Joichi Ito, David Nordfors, Esther Wojcicki, and Joon Yun.

“All people can create value—but for that to happen, we need to develop a people-centered, rather than a task-centered, economy. Today, we are very far from that. According to Gallup, of the five billion people on this planet aged fifteen or older, three billion work in some way. Most of them want full-time jobs, but only 1.3 billion have them. Of these, only 13 percent are fully engaged in their work, giving and receiving its full value. This terrible waste of human capacity and mismanagement of people’s desire to create value for each other is more than just very bad business. It is an insult to ourselves and to all human beings.”

P.S. In response to a question by Omar below, I offered that on current trajectories and lacking long term planning, I fear the worst… and I have been writing the most about that… Here is a 6 minute talk for the X-Prize peeps on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgzaYOZUIfU&feature=youtu.be&t=13s