What with these leaping and dancing machines, you’d be forgiven for assuming the rule of the meat people nears its end. Nope.
David Rose, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, agreed. Mr. Rose said he likes to think of increasingly intelligent machines as tools, not as beings that can do a human’s job. “I wish the unit of measure weren’t jobs,” he said. If artificial intelligence were thought of more as a tool, its benefits could be measured in lives saved, hours saved, efficiencies gained and health and safety improvements.
Mr. Rose didn’t shy away from pointing out that technology has already done a spectacular job of destroying work and creating better jobs in its wake. Two hundred years ago, at least 70% of Americans worked on farms. Today, less than 2% of Americans do. If you would have told a farmer in 1880 that in the future people would make a nice living as yoga instructors, they would have said, “What’s yoga?”
