Andrew McAfee: Are Droids Taking Our Jobs?

December 8, 2016

Thanks to Liz, I found out about this great TEDxBoston talk by Andrew McAffee on robots and jobs. It’s a nice companion piece to the recent news/announcement about the automated Amazon Go grocery store.

Though McAffee’s talk is from 2012, it’s still a very eye-opening take on the role of technology, and the impact it will have on the labor force in the not-so-distant future.

In one of his examples, McAffee mentions language translation as a task that previously required a human being to perform:

Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones. And if any of us have used these, we know that they’re not perfect, but they’re decent.

The last sentence there reminded me a lot of Clay Shirky’s thoughts on Napster, Udacity, and the role of MOOCs in higher education.

McAffee’s talk is a short one, but well worth watching. That is, unless you decide to write a bot to go through the transcript for you, and send along the summary.

autograph book robots TED video

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