Phil Christman in Plough:
To wake up one morning and learn that one’s job might soon be “disrupted,” or outright eliminated, by the emergence of an overhyped new technology that excites rich people is – let’s start here – a pretty common experience by now. It puts you in good company. A club that includes linotype-machine operators, taxi drivers, some farm workers, and the original Luddites, but somehow never includes capital owners or their profligate children: this is, all things considered, not a bad club, and one would wish to join it but for the sparsity of the accommodations. But if the prediction of redundancy comes true, this solidarity in misfortune will probably prove cold comfort.
Say, for example, you’re a college English teacher, and a significant portion of the nation’s venture capitalists seems convinced that a machine can now do – or will soon do, very soon, just a few more gigatons of water from now – what you are supposedly training your students to do. Say as well that these same machines, supposedly, are only one or two more clicks of Progress’s wheel away from being able to judge and grade the work thus generated. Clearly, you and your thousands of colleagues are now free to seek exciting new opportunities in our ever-moving economy – that is, to reap the punishment that you deserve for having cared about writing and reading in the first place. You ought to have learned to code, a skill that is itself also supposedly on its way to being rendered redundant by this new technology. Funny how that works out.
More here.
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