Ruminating on the next 500 years, a couple interviews
Image by jurvetson
Many of the new jobs in the new economy — like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers — interface to the digital world, filling in a critical gap at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the march of Moore’s Law.
A couple interviews just came out: this fireside chat in TechCrunch and a long-form interview in the MIT Tech Review with more details on the ephemeral edge of automation.
(In the TechCrunch interview, I glossed over an important point about serfdom and slavery: I don’t advocate it because it is inhumane (obviously) and one day we may expand our view of inhumane employment (think of repetitive physical labor). I meant to add a rejoinder that in the future, slavery for physical labor will thankfully no longer be cost effective, as robots will do those tasks more cheaply, removing demand from the equation.)
