The financial press is excited today because Eric Schmidt described himself as a robotic ‘job elimination denyer’. However, a closer look at what Schmidt actually said shows that he holds no illusions about the changes that are coming. First of all there is the phrase ‘job elimination denyer’ by itself. In its modern use, the…
Comedian Bill Maher caused a bit of a stir when he suggested that a maximum wage, an upper limit on income, would be a good idea. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve included the clip at the bottom of this page. Maher is funny and the idea certainly has its merits, but I don’t think…
According to a recent study from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology nearly half of all US jobs could be replaced by computers over the next two decades. Although the report specifically mentions US jobs, it is fairly safe to assume that this means a significant impact on jobs worldwide. I’ve…
A recent article about robotic writers with artificial intelligence in Mashable was surprising, but not the part about automated writing. The surprising, and slightly scary, part was that the US Central Intelligence Agency has a venture capital division: “The CIA’s venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unknown amount in a company called Narrative Science,…
I’ve mentioned in the past that, in the future, there will be no jobs. I don’t just mean “unskilled” jobs and I don’t mean that everyone will be a freelancer. I mean that there will be no jobs. There may be a relative handful of people in senior administrative positions and a handful of people…
On May 12, Salon published ‘Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class‘ since that time I’ve had the article sent to me about a half a dozen times from people who thought I might like to comment. Sadly, most of those people do not seem to have read the entire article and somehow missed…
I’m sure you’ve seen them on sites like Craigslist and Kijiji: Ads that offer money for articles, people looking for freelance writers. Many of them will ask you for sample articles. Well it turns out that in many cases that those aren’t job postings. They are just looking for free content for other people’s web…
