Tim Barden
1 min readNov 16, 2021

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Your third point is overly optimistic I fear.

The economic and social impact of technology is not arithmetic, it's close to logarithmic. Human labour will increasingly fall short. As to the net benefit posture that technical progress will create (at least) as many jobs as it destroys, it's false logic. Humans improve too slowly to keep up and the percentage of humans having the capacity to contribute will quickly decline. Joe Biden's hope to convert coal miners into "coders" will not happen. Not only are the skillsets completely different, we are on the cusp of AI driven software solutions that will write software much more efficiently than humans can.

We must rethink our socioeconomic paradigm where the value of a human being is (mostly) represented by the dollars they can earn from a "job". When the machines are producing all the goods and services we value at an ever declining cost what do we do with the factory workers, coal miners and parking lot attendants? Not to mention the radiologists that no longer have to read medical images or law clerks who don't have to develop yet another iteration of a title search.

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Tim Barden
Tim Barden

Written by Tim Barden

Independent. Heterodox. Passionate about the arts, society and technology. IT Professional turned Arts Professional.

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