Week 27, 2018

Automation: Universal Income, Pattern Recognition, and Dataism

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

Each week, I share three ideas on how to make work better. And this week, the theme is automation. At a personal level, automation is generally seen as a good thing. But on a socioeconomic level, the picture becomes decidedly less rosy. Read on the see why.

1. Universal Income

Automation threatens to kill millions of American jobs. Andrew Yang doesn’t think we’re prepared. He’s running for president in 2020, and as he recently explained on the Sam Harris podcast, he wants to give every US citizen $1,000 per month to help them cope

For more on this, check out Yang’s 2020 campaign site and this interview with Yang on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast.

2. Pattern Recognition

Yang makes a compelling argument. And less you think automation is limited to blue-collar work, think again. Machines recognize patterns better than we do. Much better. And that means doctors, lawyers, traders, and accountants are on the chopping block as well.

For more on this, check out this Fortune article on Five White-Collar Jobs that Robots have Already Taken.

3. Dataism

And that’s just the beginning. Fast forward 100 years and things start to look really bleak. In Homo Deus, author Yuval Noah Harari cautions that automation and Big Data is giving rise to a new ideology that values information flow above human happiness and wellbeing.

*Homo Deus is an excellent read (as is Harari’s previous Sapients). And if you want more input on Dataism, Wikipedia has you covered.*

To be fair, quite a few people say that while automation may kill some job, it will also create others. And there’s probably truth to that. Whatever the case, it pays to remember that there are two sides to the automation coin.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, stay calm.