Technology. Friend or Foe. Third in a Series

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Recently the Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic all had cover stories on whether technology is a friend or foe.

“What may be looming is something different: an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently” stated the article in The Atlantic.

That’s scary.

Many experts are seeing a “new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.” At Oxford, researchers have stated machines might take half of all U.S. jobs within 20 years.

MIT Management Professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in “Will Humans Go the Way of Horses” in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, make the simple and clear point… we humans will decide how technology our lives and futures.  They state “We humans are a deeply social… the desire for human connection carries over to our economic lives.” They go onto argue that in light of these technological changes, governments should be passing education reform, stimulating entrepreneurship and investing in research.