AI will replace most humans – but then what?
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics could rapidly accelerate this trend, with significant implications for inflation, the size of government and US-China relations.
Over the long arc of history, technological advances have enabled industries to emerge as workers, released from 'older' jobs by machines, have been able to transition into newer ones.
About 60% of workers today are employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940, or 74% if we consider only the professional category, which added the most workers during the past eight decades.
However, recent academic research suggests an inflection point may have been reached in the US where technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating.
David Autor, an economist at MIT and winner of the 2005 John Clark Bates Medal, argued that since 1980, the jobs replaced by automation have not been fully offset by new jobs created.
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