There can be no doubt that technological progress has resulted in a far more prosperous society. Technology has often disrupted entire industries and, in some cases — as with the mechanization of agriculture — destroyed millions of jobs. In the long run, however, the economy has always adjusted and new jobs have been created, often in entirely new industries. Why then should we be concerned that
the revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence will lead to sustained unemployment? I think the answer has to do with the nature the work that most members of our workforce are best equipped to perform.A strong argument can be made that a very large percentage of jobs are, on some level, essentially routine and repetitive in nature. In other words, the job can be broken down into a discrete set of tasks that tend to get repeated on a regular basis and can be predicated based on historical data. It seems likely that, as both computer hardware and software continue to progress, a large fraction of these job types are ultimately going to be susceptible to robotic or software automation, and in particular to machine learning technology.
