Don’t Fear Automation: A Rationalist’s Perspective

At Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, challenges the common assumption that automation is the cause of long-term unemployment. 

As Yudkowsky argues, automation is, after all, nothing new. Consider what happened over the last four centuries as

we went from 95% of the population being farmers to 2% of the population being farmers (in agriculturally self-sufficient developed countries).  We don’t live in a world where 93% of the people are unemployed because 93% of the jobs went away. 

Read Yudkowsky’s Robots, AI and Unemployment AntiFAQs here. 

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