Saturday, October 21, 2017

Technology Will Erase Jobs—But Also Make Everything Cheap or Free

It’s no secret that technology

is threatening to take away jobs. For all the talk about robots working alongside humans rather than replacing them altogether, automation’s higher efficiency, lower costs, and increasing capability mean eventually workers will be removed from the equation in many jobs.
No one wants to be replaced by a machine, but there’s a silver lining.
The counterbalance to technological unemployment, Diamandis said, is the demonetization of living—in other words, pretty much everything we need and do in our day-to-day lives is becoming radically cheaper, if not free, and technology’s making it happen.
The most obvious and tangible example of this phenomenon is, of course, the smartphone. 20 years ago, we had a bunch of different things that each performed a single function: a camera took pictures, a flashlight lit up the dark, a TV was for watching shows, a VCR played movies, a boom box played music, and so on and so forth.