PF, thankyou for your response. The current phase of technological change poses elemental questions to humanity about agency. Unlike the authors, I'm not at all convinced "It is entirely up to us", not sure answers are even possible, but tech's trajectory is clear, and it leads to bad places for huge numbers in under two decades.

In the first instance, what *can* be done is mass-scale retraining of billions into STEM - complicated, expensive and likely unpopular - difficult to explain at the ballot box why it's necessary, but even if all this were realistic, it would only happen if pursued as a deliberate policy starting around now - and I don't see any appetite anywhere for this. If it were to happen by some miracle, it would buy time to work out what should happen next.



It frustrates me that what has been starkly apparent to many technologists for years is a blind spot for economists and politicians (with a few honorable exceptions), ie that the speed of transformation now underway is an order faster than anything in the past, and this fact alone lays waste to all conventional assumptions. Even researchers like Carl Benedikt Frey, whose work I admire greatly, seem to think takeup of automation will take time - an example explored is the spread of mechanized farming in America through the last century, but I disagree with that view. I think what took a century last time will take not much more than a decade this time.