Show for December 11, 2011. Oh, the Machinery!
Yes, people have been fretting that mechanization would render them redundant ever since the early industrial revolution. And though predictions of deep and persistent “technological unemployment” have failed to come true in the past, MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee say this time it’s for real. In their new book, Race Against the Machine, they argue that the current “jobless recovery” is in large part due to advances in machine intelligence and other technologies. I spoke to Erik Brynjolfsson about the problem and some possible fixes. I also played a bit of my 2010 interview with composer David Cope, who’s trained computers to write classical music in the manner of Bach, Beethoven and others. You can listen to that here.
The idea that machines will take our jobs isn’t new, of course. In fact, it was considered pretty hoary by the time of this 1931 article from Modern Mechanix. Read it here.
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