Elon Musk told the U.S. - Saudi Investment Forum last Wednesday that within a few years, artificial intelligence will be so powerful that “no one will have to work” if they don’t want to. Work will become “optional.” We’ll all live in a post-scarcity paradise where robots do everything and money itself becomes obsolete.
It may sound exciting to youngsters, but the rest of us have heard this before. Socialists like Musk have been
saying it for well over a century. Oscar Wilde predicted machines would replace human labor in 1891. John Maynard Keynes doubled down in 1930, predicting his grandchildren would work 15-hour weeks because technology would solve the “economic problem” forever.
Fast-forward to the 1990s. Jeremy Rifkin’s bestseller The End of Work declared that computers and the internet were the final nail in the coffin of human labor. Less than 20% of us would still have full-time jobs by the early 21st century. Wired magazine ran cover lines screaming “The
Death of Jobs” and “Work Is Dead—Get Over It.”
With each new technological breakthrough – steam, electricity, the assembly line, computers, the internet, and now Artificial Intelligence (AI) - dreamy socialists have predicted a world without scarcity and thus without the need for human labor. And every single time they’ve been wrong. Not just a little wrong. Spectacularly, catastrophically wrong.
Why?
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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened
to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
Tom