For all the issues raging in the 2016 election, neither candidate is talking about the most important one: None of us are going to have jobs in two decades.
With advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, pretty much every task that is part of the fabric of modern society will be handled by machines. We will have robot bloggers, robot chefs, robot congressmen, robot garbagemen, and robot baseball players. We will even have robots inventing robots, I shit you not.
It’s happening swifter than you think.
A report by Forrester, a technology research company, found that six percent of all jobs will be replaced by robots within the next five years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 144 million employed people in the U.S.
That’s eight-and-a-half million jobs that will be gone by 2021.
“By 2021, a disruptive tidal wave will begin,” said Brian Hopkins, VP at Forrester, in the report. “Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service, and consumer services.”
The [robots] of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios. Those expanded cognitive abilities will make intelligent agents much more useful to people, and drive widespread adoption over the next three to five years, the report found.
Great, man. Just fucking great.
And once every human is replaced by a robot, and no one has any means by which to make money, what will happen to the world?
Well, no one fucking knows. Either complete and utter anarchy or a life of leisure unlike any civilization has ever known.
Should be a fun decade.
[Via CNBC]