And what if one of “these people” is you or I?
My observation is that we are eliminating many jobs now and we won’t be able to train the workforce, and Ray’s argument is that it’s always been like this and we’ve figured it out before and we’ll figure it out again. Looking at the pace of change, starting with self-driving cars that can now do the jobs of Uber drivers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers, that’s millions of jobs lost over there. What do we do with these people? Many of them are not retrainable for the technology economy and we’re not going to be able to create new jobs for them within five years or so.
The more I look into it, the more I’m convinced that change is happening too fast, disruption is happening too fast, jobs are being wiped out too fast, and the fact that we’re still in denial about it and not acknowledging that this destruction is happening gets me worried. We should instead be talking about how can we minimize its impacts or come up with a safety net or retraining program and create as many new jobs as we can and spread the prosperity. We are not having these discussions. ~ Vivek Wadhwa
Bold emphasis added by me.
See the rest of the interview with Vivek Wadhwa and his thoughts on how human jobs will be replaced here: ‘RoboCop is coming’