The Future of Unemployment

An excerpt from an article in The Atlantic, Robots and the Future of Unemployment by Mike Konczal:

Let’s start this off with a quote from one of my favorite movies, the film-essay documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a movie about cinema and representations of urban spaces that is made entirely of clips of movies set in Los Angeles with a narration over it describing how those movies both represent and inform our visions of Los Angeles and the larger country. During the scenes where the narrator discusses the movie Blade Runner(1982) and the sexy killer human-impersonating robot played by Daryl Hannah, he makes this important point:

Perhaps [Blade Runner] expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter and blander. Buffalo will become Miami, and Los Angeles will become Death Valley at least until the rising ocean tides wipe it away. Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it. Robots won’t be sexy or dangerous, they’ll be dull and efficient and they’ll take our jobs.

Click here to read the entire article…