fiogf49gjkf0d
“If the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves” – that was Aristotle, anticipating a pleasant future of self-operating lutes and looms. That is a vision we have always nurtured. But with each big leap in technological progress, we have also worried about the economic and social disruption it could set off, the efficiency of machines and the impending obsolescence of being human.
With the digital revolution and its promise of self-driving cars, robots, machine intelligence and an Internet of Things, there is legitimate reason to worry about a jobless future. A recent Oxford study that analysed over 700 occupations concluded that 47% of these jobs – including in transport, logistics, office administration – could be automated out of existence in the coming decade. The advocates of tech claim that new opportunities are constantly being created. But what if they are wrong?
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa is among the pessimists. He believes we are looking at a future where millions are permanently unemployed. This could be a dystopian future, with a tiny tech elite operating the machinery of civilisation while everybody else is dirt poor. Or it could be an arcadian one if, let us say, the government guarantees an income to everyone and we are liberated from the compulsion of having to slave away at work. In such a world work would be like a philanthropic vocation – engaged in only by those who have a yen for it. They might have de-addiction centres for workaholics even as the rest of us cultivate our hobbies. Don’t hand over everything to the machines, though. Masters may not require slaves but we could all be slaves of machines – which Aristotle did not reckon into his pretty picture.
(Source: Editorial in The Times Of India dated 23-07-2015.)
