What are human workers going to do when super-intelligent robots and computers are better than us at doing everything? That is one of the questions that a new study by Dr. Carl Frey and Dr. Michael Osborne of Oxford University sought to address, and what they concluded was that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs could be automated within the next 20 years.
MY TAKE: When I was a lad and asserted to my folks I was going to be a musician, Dad used to tell me, “Son, better have something to fall back on.” He was right, of course, but that didn’t deter me. Off I went into a field that, in subsequent years with fly-by-night bands and 10,000 gigs for mediocre bucks, I would sometimes question the wisdom of entering… mostly on grounds of that old standby, “job security”.
But over the past few years, it’s been seeming more and more obvious that any trade I could have possibly entered (and it would have been a trade, as I come from working class folks who like doing things with their hands) would be destined for the scrap heap as automation (and later, out-sourcing) took its toll. Now I think being a professional musician might actually be one of the most secure jobs in the future, not one of the least.
There’s this thing about all art — the human perspective — that while other, more mundane, fields may get eaten alive by the great maw of technology, people (and artists market to people) eternally turn to human expression and artistic achievement to renew themselves. Should that ever change, if ever the mass of people begin to find programmed bots making so-called “art” more emotionally and spiritually satisfying than that made by humans… well, then truly that would be a world in which I do not belong.
I quite expect to see some glitzy guitar-playing robot one of these days that actually does a credible job of twanging the strings… and I think that might be very interesting for maybe 10 minutes. After that… I’d be advising it to find something to fall back on.
