As Long as There Are Humans, There Will Be Jobs

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence -- or “robots” in common parlance – is whether they will make human workers obsolete.

Recent rapid progress in machine learning -- a very powerful and flexible statistical prediction technique -- has raised worries that machines will soon be able to outperform humans at any conceivable task. Already, occupations that employ very large numbers of Americans, such as commercial trucking, are under threat. Workers displaced by machine learning may be able to find new, even more valuable things to do, as happened when industrial technology displaced craft manufacturers over a century ago, or they may not -- and even if they do, getting there may involve a long and bumpy road.