Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle
“[A]s artificial intelligence starts coming for our jobs, I wonder how well the professional class will take its own medicine. Will we gracefully transition to lower-skilled service work, as we urged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we fight like hell to retain what we have, for our children as well as ourselves? For I suspect AI is coming for a lot of professional class jobs, despite how many people I hear say a machine can never do what they do. We’re accustomed to think of automation as primarily displacing the working class, but as economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in 2002, ‘the idea that technological advances favor more skilled workers is a 20th-century phenomenon;’ in the 19th century, steam-driven machines replaced a lot of skilled artisans, and AI currently looks to be pointed in a similar direction.” (04/29/24)