Technological unemployment: Difference between revisions

As articulated by Keynes: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”<ref>Keynes: ''Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren''</ref>. It is fairly obvious that this can only ever be a temporary effect: the entrepreneurial possibilities created by freeing labour up from one occupation to do anything else must mean in the long run ''there can be no technological unemployment''. But — just try telling that to {{author|Daniel Susskind}}.<ref>We say to him what we [[The Singularity is Near - Book Review|said a decade]] ago to {{author|Ray Kurzweil}}: “... it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re only six months from the new decade, [''note: that was the '''last''' decade.''] but, being as path-dependent as it is the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions — until the results are in.”</ref>

To our simplistic way of looking at it, to believe the contrary is to be afflicted by, at least, a lack of imagination — and really, a lack of ''wisdom'' — the kind you can only get from the school of ''life''. And, in any case, the whole edifice of technological development is founded on that being utterly wrong. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and the history of technology is the accidental discovery of whole new ways of dealing with old problems. Old problem goes away and in its place we find a range up untapped, hitherto unimagined ''possibilities''.