It’s a strange phenomenon: Lots of attention is being paid to both intensely downbeat and intensely upbeat visions of where the world is headed.

The gloomy view is the much more familiar one because it’s been around for more than 200 years: Technology is going to take our jobs! In Britain, early in the 19th century, the Luddite movement saw textile workers and weavers rioting and attacking factories after the introduction of weaving machines made their skills far less valuable. In 1930, the American Federation of Musicians founded the Music Defense League to try to keep musicians’ jobs from being lost to recorded music, specifically in movie theaters, after Hollywood invented talkies. That same year, John Maynard Keynes — the legendary economist who coined the term “technological unemployment” — warned that tech advances would wipe out job category after job category. Three decades later, President Kennedy worried about — and then Nobel Prize winners urged President Johnson to worry about — tech-driven job losses.

The fretting seemed to ebb in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was trendier to talk about economist Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of free-market “creative destruction” spurring the economy to greater and greater heights. But then came the rise of the internet and the idea that technology would kill more jobs than it created was back in vogue — certainly at least with travel agents, sales people, video store clerks, film developers, loan agents and mail carriers.


By 2013, when a pair of Oxford professors estimated that robots and algorithms had the potential to wipe out 47 percent of 702 U.S. job categories, glum fears of a jobless future were rampant — and the idea that mostly low-skill jobs were at risk was long gone. This is from The Economist’s analysis of the Oxford report and related research:

“We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. No office job is safe,” says Sebastian Thrun, an AI professor at Stanford ... . Automation is now “blind to the color of your collar,” declares Jerry Kaplan, another Stanford academic and author of “Humans Need Not Apply,” a book that predicts upheaval in the labor market. Gloomiest of all is Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur and the bestselling author of “Rise of the Robots.” He warns of the threat of a “jobless future,” pointing out that most jobs can be broken down into a series of routine tasks, more and more of which can be done by machines.

This prediction feels more prophetic all the time. And that’s not just because robot-baristas prepare coffee concoctions far more precisely than the humans they replace. It’s because Google announced just last week that in tests its artificial intelligence program did an outstanding job in breast cancer detection.


Pathologists, beware. Or maybe just about everyone, beware.

Or not. Another perspective that’s gaining attention goes a much different way. Keynes, the same famous economist who predicted tech would destroy jobs, also predicted that eventually capitalism would be able to produce so many goods so inexpensively that humans would no longer have to work “to live wisely and agreeably and well.” Of late, this notion of a “post-scarcity” world has become common enough that we’re beginning to see serious arguments that posit such a world would be like the one envisioned in “Star Trek” and that establishing a universal basic income may ultimately be the best way to divvy up this coming cornucopia of wealth.

Such an idea may seem nutty in a world where virtually all nations have substantial national debt and so many billions of people barely scrape by. But everything changes if energy becomes free or dirt cheap. If that happened, as Andrew C. Revkin wrote in 2009 in The New York Times ...

We could synthesize food, even meat .... . We could render water from the sea or briny aquifers drinkable in endless amounts.


An October article in Tech Radar noted this possibility may not be as science fiction-y as it sounded in 2009:

On Friday afternoon a couple of weeks back, while you were eyeing the clock and wondering if it was time yet to go to the pub, nuclear physicists at MIT brought us closer to unlimited free energy than we’ve ever been in the history of mankind. And it’s all thanks to the promise of nuclear fusion.

At the Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, the pressure of the burning plasma inside the chamber rose higher than it ever has before — to 2.05 atmospheres. Plasma pressure is the key ingredient for producing energy from nuclear fusion, and this new record is 15 percent higher than the previous record, set at the same facility in 2005.


Nuclear fusion is often described as the “holy grail” of power generation. It’s clean, safe, pretty much carbon-free and capable of producing nearly unlimited amounts of energy. If you can get the plasma’s pressure and temperature high enough, then the energy released begins to exceed that required to keep it going.

But analysts who work for Citi, the giant international bank, don’t think such breakthroughs are necessary for the world to see much cheaper energy. Last July, they wrote ...

As new builds in the power sector involve more near zero-variable cost sources, such as wind and solar, along with greater demand and storage optimization, the goal of dramatically lowering energy costs for all, with the possibility of free energy in some corners, may finally come to fruition. ... Now, Big Data and advanced analytics are developing rapidly to improve forecasting, automation, customization and the democratization of energy. The end result is that we are producing more energy with fewer resources.


And if energy became dirt cheap or free, then 3D printing technology could go unimagined places. The Independent newspaper had a good explainer of how it works.

3D printers are a new generation of machines that can make everyday things. They’re remarkable because they can produce different kinds of objects, in different materials, all from the same machine. ...

The 3D printing process turns a whole object into thousands of tiny little slices, then makes it from the bottom-up, slice by slice. Those tiny layers stick together to form a solid object. Each layer can be very complex, meaning 3D printers can create moving parts like hinges and wheels as part of the same object.

Custom manufacturing using 3D printing is already booming. The U.S. Army is looking at using the technology to custom-print food for its soldiers. Much more radically, bioprinting allows for the creation of eyes, blood vessels, skin, noses, jaws, ears and more. Former IBM innovation guru Paul Brody says machine learning is improving the possibilities of 3D printing so rapidly that pretty soon the operative question will be “what can’t you 3D print?”


Sounds like a real-life “Star Trek” replicator to me. But does the technology plus free energy equal a post-scarcity world? Maybe, if the benefits can be widely spread by beneficent governments.

That, of course, is an immense “if.” Here’s hoping we find out sooner rather than later.

Reed is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Have an idea for a topic for this kind of treatment? Contact him at chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

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