AI, Big data, Automation,
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Bill Gates and now Mark Zuckerberg have used public forums to talk about the coming seismic shift in jobs that learning machines and automation will have. But I worry what they are actually doing is softening the message for their audiences. Zuckerberg focused in his Harvard commencement address on the impact on low end jobs. Gates sounded his trademark optimistic tone about the future. While I agree that the stats don't lie and we live in an unprecedented period of peace and declining poverty I worry that both of these tech leaders may be sparing their audience a painful message. Be wary of any conversation about AI and automation that focuses exclusively on self driving cars, warehouse workers and the like. We can deal with those because it implies there will be plenty of opportunity for high paying white collar workers. You can write the whole thing off as an overall positive element of development. From subsistence farmers to information workers in a few centuries. Affected workers can hope to get enough time out of their careers to put their kids through graduate school and look forward to their family moving up. Instead, what if Zuckerberg stood up at Harvard and said the real risk is to high paying jobs including architects, engineers, lawyers, accountants, managers, doctors and even computer programmers. Presumably, there were few long-haul truck drivers, current or future, in the audience at the Harvard commencement. What if the pair came out and said that programming jobs are at risk? How differently would their audiences respond? Our economy and society arguably depend upon a few agreed upon premises; social mobility, progress destroys jobs but creates better ones. People need work and will lower standards if forced to. If graduates with JDs cannot find jobs as lawyers and begin competing with business graduates for management or consulting jobs and those people compete with sales people for those jobs where does it end? You cannot run our economy on taxing billionaires alone, in spite of that tiny group's value in political campaigns. The top 1/8th of US households have incomes well above $100k a year. The majority of these people rely on wages, not capital gains or investment income. They are wage earners from dual income sales couples and programmers to dentists, lawyers, doctors and CEOs. Decimate this group and you will have real problems. Imagine the best educated parts of society competing for shrinking job opportunities. What if we create too few robotics engineering and automation design jobs to make up for this. This group represents the upwardly mobile hopes of millions of working class people. Drivers may accept that their job wont always be around so long as their kids can go to medical school. Without that hope and the critical tax base this population represents how can we hope to invest and innovate our way through the job disruptions?
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AuthorMichael Zammuto is the CEO of Completed.com and Cloud Commerce and a strategic adviser to several startups. Mike's background is in SaaS services, B2C sites and B2B firms and has worked extensively in online reputation, digital marketing and branding. Archives
October 2019
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