The Future of Technology - And Why We Should Be Worried

Last week, I shared my experience about the use of my telephone versus my dad's use of his telephone and reflected on how the various uses of technology have changed over the last thirty years.  Today, I want to share more about what I've learned about the future of technology and why we should be worried.

Technological optimists said that one day we'd have driver-less cars.  Today, that is slowly becoming a reality.  Robots are taking over the jobs that blue collar workers did fifty years ago and the jobs that our students are being trained for with the factory-model style of education.

When I look at my own children, I want to know how to best train them for a future of jobs that aren't known to us yet.  They are three and five.  The experts are saying that beyond basic literacy and basic numeracy, the next most important concept to foster in our children is creativity.

Why?

Creativity spawns entrepreneurship, which is where the growth of the economy will come from. Currently, entrepreneurship is on the decline and so is the middle class.  This is what the experts are actually most worried about.  The income disparity will be the destruction of the US Economy more than any jobs that are being replaced by robots.


With this, it's important to note that robots are becoming much better at doing things that only humans could do a few years ago.  Andrew McAfee, a leading economist from MIT and Harvard, states in his TED talks that translation is a good example of that.  It used to take a human to translate a document, now machines can do the job okay (not perfect, but okay).  His projection is that in a few short years, they won't be one or two times better, they will be 16 times better.  Therefore, we need to change how we are preparing our children for the future. You can view his speech here.

In the short term, we can promote entrepreneurship, encourage education beyond the compulsory age, and double-down on infrastructure; however, unless we address the economic challenges that we are facing, machines will take our jobs.