œThere are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work. The logic on this topic is crystal clear. Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there™s no point in arguing about religion. These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. Andreessen staunchly believes that the exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and describes my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future, a luddite fallacy. I wish he were right, but he isn™t. And this isn™t a religious debate; it™s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances presently on the horizon, not only are low-skilled jobs at risk; so are jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast. It will shake up entire industries and eliminate professions. Within ten years, we will see Uber laying off most of its drivers as it switches to self-driving cars; manufacturers will start replacing workers with robots; fast-food restaurants will install fully automated food-preparation systems; artificial intelligence-based systems will start doing the jobs of most office workers in accounting, finance and administration. The same will hold true for professionals such as paralegals, pharmacists, and customer-support representatives. All this will occur simultaneously, and the pace will accelerate in the late 2020s. Another technologist whom I hold in high regard, Vinod Khosla, worries as I do about the effect of widening income disparity. Discussing the revolutionary progress in machine-learning technology which is enabling computers to analyse information and make judgements better than human beings can, Khosla writes: œWith less need for human labour and judgement, labour will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and machine learning technology. In an era of abundance and increasing income disparity, we may need a version of capitalism that is focused on more than just efficient production and also places greater prioritisation on the less desirable side effects of capitalism. So the real debate is about the new version of capitalism: do we design this or pretend everything will be okay as the tech elites get richer and people who lose their jobs become poorer? The impact of advancing technologies will be different in every country. China will be the biggest global loser because of the rapid disappearance of its manufacturing jobs. It hasn™t created a safety net, and income disparity is already huge, so we can expect greater turmoil there. But developing economies will be big winners. In his office in Mexico City in June, I had a lengthy discussion on this issue with Mexican industrialist Carlos Slim Domit. Slim™s solution is to institute a three-day work week so everyone can find employment and earn the money needed…
