Will Bunch On Davos: It's All About AI And Replacing Human Beings As Quickly As Possible

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I was thinking about the robot fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s and the robot realities of the 21st Century this weekend as I read a remarkable report from the World Economic Forum in Davos by the New York Times' Kevin Roose. It described in detail how the world’s billionaires and their powerful friends are talking about an automated near-future in which millions of jobs from truck driver to bookkeeper to newspaper journalist are replaced by machines. It’s a development all but guaranteed to cause massive societal upheaval but the grand poobahs of technology are powerless to stop it...because, you know, shareholders.

Roose reported that the executives talked at the posh Swiss report in business babble about a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and even spoke with empathy — in public, anyway — of a “safety net” for tomorrow’s displaced workers, while in private “these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.” The Times columnist quoted Mohit Joshi, president of the information technology firm Infosys, as saying that CEOs who once had been thinking of gently trimming their workforce because of automation are now thinking bigger, that, "Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

It’s hard to quantify how fast this is happening, but Roose made it pretty clear that executives under pressure to deliver high quarterly profits for their shareholders (and under zero pressure to worry about stuff like the unemployment rate) are movingly quick to to create a labor market where the hiring outlook is a lot better for robots than for human beings. The columnist even quoted one tech guru predicting that artificial intelligence, or AI, will eliminate 40 percent (!!!) of the world’s jobs in 15 years. And you thought voters were mad in 2016?

Roose’s column stood out because there was less reporting from the annual confab of the world’s elite at Davos than in past years — Team Trump was grounded by the government shutdown, newsrooms and travel budgets are shrinking and the journalists who are still working have been swamped by the massive garbage slick that is the Trump presidency. They spent the weekend covering the ephemeral — the political body slam of Trump by Nancy Pelosi (or Nancy, as I call her) and Roger Stone’s Nixonian salute, on endless loop — while the world’s richest (mostly) men were plotting to change life on earth as we know it.

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http://www.philly.com/opinion/commentary/robots-replacing-jobs-artificial-intelligence-presidential-election-davos-20190129.html