Eventually technology should kill pretty much all of the jobs. Human time and energy should be spent on what they find interesting, not on mundane stuff such as farming, housing, construction, database plumbing - all of which could be easily automated. No human should have to work to pay bills because there should be no bills. That should be the promise of technology. Only jobs left for humans should be things that require creativity, higher level reasoning and new ideas. Of course, there may be AI one day that does better than us on these areas as well and that's just part of evolution. It doesn't necessarily have to mean humans will go extinct. Universe has plenty of space for all of us and next generation of intellectual species.
> Technology will kill white-collar jobs.<p>Yes, we all agree. No one disputes that. This article is more about Jeff Greene's conference and biography than it is about automation. Reads like an advertorial.
I do wonder whether a certain amount of jobs will stay simply because of certain people's preferences for human made products. I mean, look at the markets for different types of food. We can genetically engineer stuff and use factory farming and all that stuff, but a significant audience just doesn't trust the technology or buy into the ethics of it.<p>Wonder if human made could become the next organic, at least among certain hipster types...<p>I also wonder whether a certain amount of this 'technology will kill jobs' stuff overlooks a small business issue that a certain few people don't seem to get. Namely, that the businesses that do well aren't always the fastest producing ones or the ones that make the 'best' products in some statistical sense. After all, about 90% of sites online are simply made obsolete by other, usually more popular ones. But many of them still gain an audience, even without being the 'best' at something or posting about it the quickest. All these talks and articles seem to assume the equivalents to Walmart and McDonalds will win in all markets because 'robots do things better/cheaper' and completely overlook such things as customer loyalty, branding, location or anything else.<p>AI is going to be an issue, but I think it's a tad premature to say all businesses will turn to it, or that businesses that aim for a more niche audience and care about the service more than the price will somehow stop being able to do well.
Why are we even talking about this guy? While this prediction may be true in the long run, it's not really news, and we're a long, long ways away from autonomous conversation agents that will replace expert professionals. These dramatic long-run predictions that fail to take into account other trends -- free solar energy, climatic collapse, all-you-can-edit genes -- are essentially worthless.
There was a sci fi book by (Niven?) mentioned to me by a friend about a future society where the songmakers where the most important. Anyone know the book title?