A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond

A different tack, rather than looking at human faculties and asking whether they can be replicated by a machine, is to consider the tasks themselves and ask whether they have features that make them easier or harder for a machine to handle. For instance, if you come across a task where it is easy to define the goal, straightforward to tell whether

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus once wrote: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin, who found this mysterious line in the surviving scraps of Archilochus’ poetry, famously used it as a metaphor to distinguish between two types of human being: people who know a little about a lot (the foxes) and people wh

For AI researchers, the absence of AGI is a pressing bottleneck; but in economics, it is a far weaker constraint on automation than commonly imagined. If a job is made up of ten tasks, for instance, there are two ways that progress in AI could make it disappear.

Weizenbaum did not expect very much from ELIZA because he knew that while the system might outwardly appear to be intelligent, it did not in fact think or feel like a human therapist at all. ‘I had thought it essential,’ he wrote, ‘as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope with his emotional problems