Blog Post 3: Automation and Poverty
I've been thinking about automation recently, and how it relates to the ideas we've discussed in this class. This blog post is the result of that reflection. Some background: a couple months ago, I watched a series of videos on the effects of automation on our society (One of the videos is on the right). The general theory (which I subscribe to) is that automation is about to fundamentally change our society in a massive way. As an example reinforced by this video, take transportation. 3 days ago, Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, Space-X, and real-life Tony Stark) announced that Tesla would be releasing an electric semi-truck with full automatic driving capabilities. That means that the 3.5 million truckers currently living in the US are at serious risk of losing their jobs in the next 10 years. Transportation isn't the only industry being overhauled. Virtually everything is getting automated - a deep-learning supercomputer named Watson at IBM, for instance, is now able to pre...