STEVEN BOYKEY SIDLEY: Why promising more jobs is the biggest lie
'It makes for heated dinner party conversation. Ethicists foam at the mouth. Journalists and novelists prognosticate. Dystopians cackle at the coming collapse'
A new report from PWC predicts that new technologies and automation will threaten, if not destroy over 30% of jobs in the developed world by 2030. This is not the first research paper to reach similar conclusions. Think about this for a moment - we are talking about hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing into thin air, attended by inevitable social collapse and misery. So what does that mean for SA? It means that all political parties are lying. The prospects for jobs growth are zero, and the prospects for further job losses are 100%.The sudden and astonishing ascendancy of artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning, which have lingered on the sidelines of academia since the 1950s, are now overshadowing just about every future economic indicator, and will disrupt and decimate the prospect of employment growth, all within our lifetimes. It is anybody’s guess as to whether this sort of wrenching change will be too fast for governments and societies to digest. I suspect ...
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