The Guardian - If Adam Dorr is correct, robots and artificial intelligence will dominate the global economy within a generation and put virtually the entire human race out of a job. The social scientist doubles up as a futurist and has a stark vision of the scale, speed and unstoppability of a technological transformation that he says will replace virtually all human labour within 20 years.
Dorr heads a team of researchers who have studied patterns of technological change over millennia and concluded that the current wave will not just convulse but obliterate the labour market by 2045. What cars did to horses and carts, and electricity to gas lamps, and digital cameras to Kodak, are templates for the coming shock, he says. “Technology has a new target in its crosshairs – and that’s us. That’s our labour.”
Whatever you do in whatever sector, within a generation machines will be able to perform the same task just as well, if not better, and for a fraction of the cost, says Dorr. “Costs are improving consistently, capabilities are improving consistently. We’ve seen that pattern before. If I can get the same thing or better for the same or lower cost, switching is a no-brainer. We’re the horses, we’re the film cameras.”...
Once a new technology captures just a few percentage points of “mind share or market share”, it tends to acquire overwhelming dominance within 15 to 20 years, which according to Dorr, means robots and AI will soon make human labour all but obsolete....
Jobs whose value depend on human input – such as sports coaches, politicians, sex workers, ethicists – will endure but even they will face competition from machines. “There will remain a niche for human labour in some domains. The problem is that there are nowhere near enough of those occupations to employ 4 billion people.”
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