The historical trend suggests that automation and increased efficiency create more time for innovation and lead to the creation of new goods and services, thus continually generating new jobs and roles. Over the next two decades, structural disemployment is highly unlikely, as there is no evidence of it in the statistics today. However, in the longer term, there is a risk that many people may not be able to produce things of sufficient value compared to AI, leading to potential job displacement. The speaker suggests that work isn't the ultimate goal of society, and that the focus should be on creating more efficient ways to keep people productive and healthy, liberating them from the obligation to work. This quest for radical abundance would also require addressing the challenges of redistribution, including the taxation and capture of value created in the new regime.
Mustafa Suleyman is the ultimate AI insider. As co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, he is one of the pioneers of the artificial intelligence revolution, potentially the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. His new book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma, asks questions about whether society is prepared for such rapid change. In the first of a three-part conversation for this episode of Intelligence Squared, Suleyman joined Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, live at the Tabernacle theatre in London to explain how he believes we are approaching a critical threshold in the history of humankind.
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