archive

In case robots take the jobs

Ryan Calo (Washington): Robots in American Law. The introduction to Robot Law, ed. Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr. Dana Remus (UNC) and Frank S. Levy (MIT): Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law. The end of lawyers? Not so fast. Is automating the professions a utopian pipe dream or dystopian nightmare? Frank Pasquale reviews The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind. “The process of writing decides what is to be written next,” hence, says Nick Bostrom, artificial intelligence isn’t as big an “existential risk” for publishing as for other fields — maybe. Harriet Taylor on how robots will kill the “gig economy”. Are robots job creators, or are they the reason for the economic decline of working-class Americans? Robots took the manufacturing jobs — and they’re not coming back.

Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we’re lucky. Yes, the robots will steal our jobs — and that’s fine: Those jobs will be replaced with new ones. Robots will take your job: We’re building a world where a universal basic income may be the only rational, fair way for society to function — and that’s not a future we should fear. A plan in case robots take the jobs: Give everyone a paycheck. This map shows which countries are being taken over by robots. Cheap thoughts on productivity growth: We have people simultaneously running around terrified that the robots will take all the jobs and at the same time that we will not have enough workers to support a growing population of retirees.

John Danaher (NUI Galway): Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life.