Good Lord. I have been a TechCrunch columnist for five years now, filing a piece every week, rain or shine or hail or flu, for 260 consecutive weeks. (Well–I might have missed one week when I was in Myanmar.) Can you believe it? Me neither. And so it is time, once again, for my annual self-flagellation column, wherein I itemize all the mistakes I made over the last year. Let’s start with the big one. I’ve been writing– for some years now –that automation and machine learning will transform the economy as we know it, leaving masses of people without “jobs” as we know them. Unusually, I think this is an optimistic prediction , in the long run. Most jobs-as-we-know them are dreary drudgery, after all. If robots do them for us, great! …But if technology destroys jobs faster than it creates them, our socioeconomic system built around the assumption of mass employment will be in serious peril. So how’s that transformation going? Well. Not so well , thanks for asking. Yes, technology is eating manufacturing jobs, even in China , but I see no evidence in the rich world (particularly in America, generally the canary in the coal mine) that automation has caused a permanent structural economic shift of the kind I predicted. Maybe I was too early. Maybe, I have since speculated, I was too simplistic. My new theory; technology won’t directly eat jobs — it will instead drag our economy from Mediocristan into Extremistan , wherein power laws rule, a minority of people do very well , and a majority get by, barely, as part of the precariat , taking gigs and contract work without ever really having anything like a career . But that is still just speculation too, thanks for asking. Uber is an […]
