The Miserable Lives of Cyborg Truck Drivers

But every modern business model is depending on the same old industrial age premise of making money by getting rid of people, or at least people with skills. That’s what the assembly line was for: get rid of skilled craftspeople, and create a factory system where unskilled, low-paid workers can be trained in minutes and replaced just as fast if the... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of vi... See more

First, I want to examine three of the most popular policy suggestions for adapting to the AI economy, many of them emanating from Silicon Valley. These three are largely “technical fixes,” tweaks to policy and business models that seek to smooth the transition but do not actually shift the culture. After examining the uses and weaknesses of these t

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