I’ve finally figured out what people can do when robots and AI wipe out half the occupations in the economy — they can get jobs fixing all the #$*& that doesn’t work!
The last couple of months have been a succession of extraordinarily frustrating experiences in the Bacon family — from trying to find tradesmen to complete a gutter job at my mother’s house that the original contractor left unfinished for three months… to badgering our home-warranty company to get our broken microwave repaired, and, after waiting two months for useless parts from China to arrive, to get it replaced… to calling back Comcast technicians three times to get our Internet-cable-telephone service to function properly… to complaining about a two-week-old Microsoft Surface Go tablet whose network adapter stopped working. It’s just astonishing.
If other people are having the same kinds of experiences, our consumer economy is going straight down the toilet no matter what the GDP figures say. I’ll wager that the lost productivity of 340 million Americans navigating phone trees and waiting on hold is a bigger drag on the economy than climate change, hurricanes, cyber sabotage, and telephone marketers rolled into one!
I’ll spare you the gory details but I’m spending more time than ever before dealing with problems created by other peoples’ screw-ups and crappy products. I’m normally a fairly even-tempered guy but I’ve found myself hurling profanities at the wall on one more than one occasion. Other members of my family have been reduced to literal tears.
Some people believe that the progress of AI and robotics is rushing upon us so rapidly that it will obliterate half the jobs in the economy in the next 20 years. I’ll believe it when I see it. Sure, AI might be getting smarter, but everything is getting more complex — IT systems interacting with other systems, nested within yet other systems. Lines of code are multiplying exponentially, far faster than the ability of AI to keep up. Conflicts and failures crop up with increasing frequency. Who’s winning the race — AI or complexity? Right now, I’d say complexity is sprinting ahead of the pack like Usain Bolt.
While the systems are getting more complex, people aren’t getting any smarter. Indeed, given the quality of our educational system, I suspect people are getting stupider. Either that or more people are on drugs. And in a full-employment economy, even stupid, addle-minded people can get jobs. They are wreaking havoc on our lives!
Some people say that Amazon is taking over the world. I, for one, welcome my new corporate overlord. When I bought an inexpensive glare-free Kindle e-reader, the darn thing crashed about one week after the year-long warranty expired. I left a nasty comment on Amazon’s website. A week later, someone from Amazon contacted me and wound up sending me a free replacement.
I now see Amazon as the new model for the U.S. economy. Sure, its products fall apart just like everybody else’s, but its customer follow-up is amazing. Amazon hires people whose job is to clean up other peoples’ messes. The way things are heading, we’ll all be working for Amazon in twenty years.
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