Today we will reflect that the economy will shortly wither, no one will have to work, and we will all die of starvation sitting on street corners and trying to sell each other pencils.
Work is going the way of the dodo, the Constitution, and common sense. Won’t be any.
Doom moves in ripples. Suppose that the New York Times goes all digital. The factory that makes the newsprint will have fewer orders and thus need fewer workers. The same applies to the tree farms that make the pulp for the newsprint factory. Less transportation, train or truck, will be needed to bring the newsprint to New York. The pressmen who run the presses will go, and the company that would have made replacement presses will have fewer orders. The truckers who drive the printed papers to Newark will lose their jobs, as will the people who deliver the paper to your doorstep.
Just now, unemployment seems set to increase sharply. The oncoming wave of automation looks formidable. I read of an automated bricklayer in Australia, fast, accurate, and cheap. Amazon, the Great Bookstore in the Sky, can give you almost any book electronically in five minutes at half the hardback price: Fare thee well, bookstores and publishing industry.
Everybody and his grandmother has heard of self-driving vehicles, a technology that matures rapidly and will replace first (I think) long haul truckers and then urban delivery trucks and taxis. Computers don’t drive drunk, talk on cell phones, or suffer road rage and, potentially, inter-vehicle communications would let every car know what all the others around it were going to do. Humans need not apply.
There is worse, much worse. Computers already write simple news stories, do formerly very time-consuming legal research, and engage in financial analysis. They move into medical diagnosis. Note that a computer can store the symptoms of every disease known to man, which a human doctor cannot.
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