(Unfortunately the intended video won't embed correctly. Follow this link to see the video referenced below.)
Above is a somewhat slow-moving but deceptively important presentation. W. Brian Arthur argues that the accumulation of digital processes (processors, sensors, actuators) that can talk to each other are creating a semi-autonomous second economy...an economy that produces value for the human economy with minimal human intervention.
The implication I want to focus on at the moment is the analogy to the industrial revolution and the associated challenge to employment. The argument that automation is a primary cause of unemployment is clearly gathering momentum at the moment. The same argument could have been (and surely was) made 100 years. Industrial/Mechanical technology greatly diminished the need for human labor and threatened to leave vast swaths of workers unemployed.
Yet, in the long run that is not what happened. Short term unemployment gave way to a long term structural shift in the nature of work. Industrial labor was replaced by office work. For the 19th century factory worker predictions of this impending shift would have sounded absurd. People will be paid to sit in comfortable offices and push paper around all day? But of course that was exactly what happened...and as it turned out, it was neither utopian nor dystopian. Office work had its benefits but also obvious shortcomings.
We are in a similar situation today. Clearly digital automation is taking on many of the tasks that are currently major centers of employment. We also seem to be passing through an inflection point wherein change is occurring faster than our ability to structurally adapt. However, in the long run there will surely be some value that human intelligence can add. Given our current perspective, speculation regarding that human value-add might seem absurd.
"People will get paid to do what?!?"
But that is exactly what history predicts. The human economy will do whatever the automated economy cannot. That role might seem trivial today but it will seem critical and obvious in retrospect.
