Technological unemployment: nothing new, but...

“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism (...). At the same time technical improvements (...) have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history (...). For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress(...). We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come - namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.”

This quote is not from an economist, columnist or commentator who is observing what is happening these days thanks to or because of artificial intelligence, but is taken from:

John Maynard #Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358-373.?

So, we have confirmation that history repeats itself... although this time the technological revolution has a unique novelty in the history of mankind: it can rework human thought!

I suggest an interesting read: Eric Sadin "Critica della ragione artificiale"?(The irresistible expansion of digital liberalism voiced – published by Luiss University Press in 2019), “For a few years now, we have talked only of #artificialintelligence. We get excited about their merits and we worry about any consequences. In general, we talk about this more in terms of the future than of the present. Without realizing that already today these functionalities, after a certain threshold, can deprive us individually and collectively of our freedom of choice, creating an anti-#humanity that takes shape from technical systems.”