The Future of Technology (and Poverty) #5

One of my all time favorite YouTubers and overall educational mastermind is CGP Grey. Grey has a variety of videos that he creates to educate people on controversial topics relating to science, politics, history, and philosophy, all of which are very interesting to watch and highly informative; I would highly recommend anyone to check him out.

Anyway to get to the point, Grey published a video known as "Humans Need Not Apply" in which he covers the current progression of the impact of technology in our lives today and gives insight on what the future of automation might entail. From Self-Driving cars and machines, to lawyer and doctor bots, and even creative bots capable of creating works of art both physical and musical the future of technology definitely has a lot in store for us but the big question is, are we ready?

Many of these ideas may seem fantastical or highly dangerous but it is not science fiction. All of these things already exist today in some form. Self-driven cars are not futuristic technology anymore, they are real and they are here. Many of these prototypes have already been tested countless amounts of times on highways and through cities with astounding results. Likewise IBM's "Watson" is an MD bot whose focus is to become the world's greatest doctor; capable of analyzing patients symptoms and giving accurate diagnosis with confidence levels equal to or greater than that of actual doctors. One may think, "well how can that be safe? What if the car's automation malfunctions and drives into another car? Or what if Watson misdiagnoses someone?" All of these things are very real possibilities but what needs to be understood is that these machines do not need to be perfect to be viable, they just need to be better than humans, and for that they already are. Humans are responsible for hundreds of thousands of car accidents each year and the rate of doctor misdiagnosis is alarming so its not hard to see how  a machine might better suit the job at hand. Not to mention a robot will never drink and get behind the wheel, or talk on the phone, or fall asleep, ect.

Now how does all of this relate to poverty? Quite simply, employment. With all of these new robots capable of doing your job twice as efficiently as you can and at only pennies of the cost your employment will no longer be a necessity. Pretty soon most humans in many different professions will be unemployable due to better available options in machines. To give a basic idea of how bad this might be, Grey states that "The unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%, the amount jobs that can be easily automated in some form represent 45% of the work force" an unemployment rate of 45% is so astronomical that if a solution is not found poverty will no longer be a problem, but a exorbitant epidemic of colossal proportions.