On AI and Jobs, We Are All Augmentarians Now:
Tom Davenport writes in Forbes:
For a couple of days this week, I attended the EmTech NEXT conference at MIT, which is organized by MIT Technology Review. The focus of the event was that fabled idea “The Future of Work,” and if you are on the side of the humans, the future seems pretty bright. Virtually every speaker (MIT folks, AI and robotics leaders) came out in favor of augmentation over automation. They say that AI and robots won’t take our jobs, but rather augment them by doing the things we humans don’t do so well..
I must say that I was a bit surprised that augmentation has become the consensus view among experts. That wasn’t the case three years ago, when Julia Kirby and I were writing the book that became Only Humans Need Apply. At that time, most of the bets were on automation eliminating lots of human jobs. The Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne had just published their study on “The Future of Employment,” which predicted that “47% of total U.S. employment is at risk.” Martin Ford had published the book Rise of the Robots, which basically suggested that human workers were toast. The McKinsey Global institute did a similar analysis to the Oxford researchers, and concluded that the “number”—the percentage of automatable jobs —was 45%. This was the heyday of automation fearmongering, and it all received a lot of publicity .... "
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