Physical Attraction1 Jun 2018

Future of Work, Part II - The Rant Edition

Last episode on the Future of Work, I described the problem – artificial intelligence is going to potentially make a lot of people unemployed in the near-term future; and the range of opinions, you can kind of pick and mix from:

It's the robot job apocalypse! Society as we know it will soon be over!

It's okay, we'll just give everyone a Universal Basic Income and they can all start small businesses or learn to code or something.

It's okay, we'll just retrain everyone so that all the coal miners are making solar panels now.

It's okay, AI won't replace that many people and has been greatly exaggerated; just because a job has the potential to be automated, doesn't mean that it will be automated. Instead AI will become a tool that enhances our productivity

It's okay, AI will replace a lot of people but we'll just come up with new jobs. No one is smashing spinning jennys nowadays and there aren't thousands of unemployed loom-weavers on the streets of Manchester because everyone moved on, got new demands, and now they all work in PR.

As for me – I fall in the middle of the two extreme viewpoints, the "we're all doomed" and "it's fine" viewpoints. Nice and convenient, you might say. Let me explain in a rant.

I imagine a lot of people listening are going to disagree with me. I'm not always right! Send your *constructive* criticism to www.physicspodcast.com , the contact page, or get in touch with us via Twitter @physicspod

If you like what you hear, or just that I took the time to say it, consider helping me towards my own basic income via the Patreon account or the donate button, both of which you'll find on www.physicspodcast.com . You won't even need blockchain to do it.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(247)

Climate 201: Climate Doomism (II)

In the last episode, we briefly introduced "climate change doomers" and some of their misleading claims. In this episode, I talk about despair, and why we cannot give in to it.

9 Mar 202240min

Climate 201: Climate Doomism (I)

We're going there. In this episode, I discuss why civilization is not going to imminently collapse due to climate change, explain why doomism is a new form of denialism, and debunk some of its most mi...

21 Feb 202249min

UNLOCKED: Book Club: Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants

A new episode released from behind the Patreon paywall. This episode, we'll review and discuss some of the issues raised by Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, a book that details the history of the adv...

8 Feb 202236min

Climate 201 NETS XI: Direct Air Capture, p2 and NETS conclusion

In this episode, we will continue our analysis of Direct Air Capture and conclude the series on negative emissions - crucial component of decarbonisation, or a techno-utopian distraction from the real...

24 Jan 202241min

Climate 201 NETS X: Direct Air Capture, part 1

Direct Air Capture - machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Could this be the solution to a scaleable negative emissions industry? We'll discuss the pros and cons of the technology i...

10 Jan 202237min

BONUS: Black Mirror IRL pilot - Be Right Back

Hi all! This is a slightly special bonus episode. Some years ago I had plans for another series "Black Mirror IRL", which was going to be a series of episodes looking into the technologies mentioned ...

28 Des 202140min

Climate 201: NETS VII: Ecosystem Restoration and Mangroves

What are "nature-based solutions" to climate change? Can we restore the ecosystems that we've destroyed? And how can restoring mangroves help us to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?

19 Des 202142min

Climate 201, NETS IX: Ocean Iron Fertilization

"Give me a tanker full of iron, and I'll give you a new Ice Age." It might sound like something Hank Scorpio would say, but this episode will deal with the very real idea of stimulating plankton bloom...

29 Nov 202130min