The Second Machine Age

"This book also points out how massive the improvements in AI are and how we’re entering a new age of automation. It’s no longer just muscle power, but also cognitive skills that are being automated and we need to plan for what comes next. Brynjolfsson and McAfee think that if we get the transition right, people will still work full-time. They will still be able to earn most of their income through work. We will do different types of jobs but full employment will still be a possibility. That’s the big difference between this book and the previous one. I’m more radical than either of them, because I think massive and inevitable unemployment is a distinct possibility. The sorts of jobs Brynjolfsson and McAfee think we’ll be doing is working with computers. For example, think about a doctor. At the moment, if there’s anything wrong with you, you go and see a doctor. You wait an hour — because there’s a law somewhere, I don’t know who wrote it, that you have to wait an hour for a doctor. You go into a surgery and the doctor doesn’t actually see you, because she’s busy typing into a computer, but you spend a few minutes there, and she says, “Take some of that and come and see me tomorrow if it’s still a problem.” In future, what will happen is you’ll breathe into your smartphone. It will analyze the components of your breath and say, “You’ve eaten too much spinach, that’s why you’ve got an upset stomach. Go and eat some bread.” It will give you a nice, quick diagnosis and will sort out 99% of problems. In my view of the future, that means a lot of doctors won’t have a job. In Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s view of the future, it simply means that the appointments you still have with the doctor are about more serious things. She spends longer with you. So the doctor is doing as much work as before, but doing higher value work and we are all getting an enormously better service, in fact. This is one of the great things about AI: It could turn healthcare into healthcare. At the moment healthcare is actually sickcare. We spend something like 80%-90% of the money that we ever spend on each person in the last year of their life. That’s not wasted money, because you wouldn’t want to not do it, but it’s a bad orientation of resources. Healthcare could become, thanks to AI, an industry for keeping people healthy as long as possible. Brynjolfsson and McAfee also think that people won’t work in call centers or on waste collection services anymore. We’ll work caring for each other, providing empathy and, where appropriate, physical care for each other. We’ll all be in touchy feely jobs and become artists. I think they think that’s the future."