I certainly agree that technology has the potential to replace jobs in the knowledge industry just as much as at lower-skilled levels. However whenever I read about how technology is going to change the world I can’t help feeling that the authors are being overly optimistic.

Look at enterprise software, for example. In theory, software was meant to revolutionize the way we do work, and certainly things have changed, but on the whole I think most enterprise software is bad. Really bad. It doesn’t work well. It still requires a lot of input from human workers. It’s slow. In theory, it could have been a driving force behind increased worker productivity, but the data suggest that productivity has been flat in recent years. I think at the top level, software is doing some amazing things. But that is just the tip on the iceberg, and a lot of what is underneath is under-performing horribly.

I think ISPs are another great example. The internet is very basis of almost all technological advances, and yet it is provided to most consumers by woefully inefficient companies who suck at customer service and who have clunky, poorly rendering websites. And Verizon employ 180,000 people.

Do you really think the self driving truck industry is going to be some magically efficient and streamlined organization? Or are the humans that ultimately design and operate it going to turn it into an inefficient monstrosity, like we seem to manage to do with almost everything else?

Or take a company like gong.io, mentioned in your article. Great, they have developed AI to replace Sales Coaches. But how many people does it take to develop and market the software? How many more will it take to scale up to where it can really replace every Sales Coach in the country? How many people will be employed by competitor companies when they see the market emerging and try to catch up? What new jobs will be created, like “Sales Coach AI procurement manager”?

This seems to be the side of the equation that is missed by the “technology is here to take all our jobs” crowd. I would call it the realism side. Its fine to list all the ways that new technology is going to be great, but don’t forget the ‘cons’ column.

There was an article about all the jobs self driving cars will destroy. Not just drivers, but the fact that, for example, self driving cars won’t speed, so we “won’t need traffic cops anymore”. The same week, I saw another article about how pedestrians could game the AI of self driving cars to herd them like sheep, since they will be programmed with certain logic so they don’t run over anyone. So you see, we may eliminate one possible crime (speeding) but you don’t think we will create the opportunity for a whole new category of crime in the process, namely, “Interference with an autonomous vehicle” or some similar sounding charge? So the article only looked at one side of the equation — what jobs will disappear — but devoted no imagination to what new jobs will be created, whether intentionally or not!