I feel like everyday I see ten articles exclaiming “the end of human jobs” or “robots are taking over”. Although robotic improvements are happening at an exponential rate, robots are nowhere close to being able to take control of human production. The major missing link is an understanding of prices. Robots don’t operate under scarcity or supply and demand and they don’t have millions of thoughts racing through their neurons every single day. Robots are as good as we program them to be and anyone who has ever tried programming knows how hard it is to get right.
The leaps from artificial intelligence and machine learning should make our programming far more efficient as robots can learn faster. But that doesn’t mean humans will be without work. Just because technology advances doesn’t make manpower obsolete. We’re on the edge of a new wave, the technology era so-to-speak, and that can lead to a lot of fearmongering. We’re not being replaced by machines. If anything, we’re going to start growing exponentially smarter alongside the machines.
Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action, has a great quote on the inability of machines to replicate the human mind.
Technology operates with countable and measurable quantities of external things and effects; it knows causal relations between them, but it is foreign to their relevance to human wants and desires…Technology tells how a given end could be attained by the employment of various means which can be used together in various combinations, or how various available means could be employed for certain purposes. But it is at a loss to tell man which procedures he should choose out of the infinite variety of imaginable and possible modes of production.
A machine is not a human mind. It doesn’t have wants and desires. A machine doesn’t have to choose between millions of different ways to spend it’s time. Machines are fundamentally different than humans. (Note: Brain emulation, when possible, is something that might make human production near obsolete). Although people will continually debate the merits of artificial intelligence and technological progress, the human workforce isn’t going anywhere. Most likely we’ll become even more efficient with our technology counterparts.