Economist Erik Brynjolfsson, and research scientist Andrew P. McAffee intended to write a book about how innovation and technology would spur job creation. The two M.I.T. professors ended up writing about how more and more workers are being displaced by automated processes. These findings will be released today in the pretty much all automated, no humans involved e-book format.
The M.I.T. authors’ claim that automation is accelerating is not shared by some economists. Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who contend that productivity improvement owing to technological innovation rose from 1995 to 2004, but has trailed off since.
This is the part of the sci-fi futuristic hellscape movie where the protagonist wakes from coma-inducing anesthetics and looks around to find himself naked and living in a pod of life-sustaining gel. Of course once his eyes focus, he sees he’s in a room full of thousands of pods. The camera pulls back to show room, warehouse after warehouse of the same scene.
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