It must have felt slightly odd when, at the Morreeb Dunes Festival 2017, United Arabs Emirates, robots substituted human jockeys in the camel race.
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In his farewell speech, in Chicago, Obama explicitly said:

The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete.

Those words were an apt reminder, if anything, of the interesting report that the White House commissioned to top experts in the field, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Economy” (link|pdf). Quite unusually in the litany of experts works on the topic, the report borders on ideas such as universal basic income, the hollowing out of middle-class as a link in the erosion of the political center, the (education) measures necessary to accompany the transition – a stark reminder of the huge increase of public spending in education at the beginning of 20th century that eased the transition in US  from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

Further pointers in this previous post, on Human and Horses.

Categories: Technology