Machines could put more than half the world's population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence's threat to the economy should not be understated.
Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow, said that technology presents a more subtle threat than the masterless drones that some activists fear.
He suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-class jobs and exacerbating inequality.
"Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread'," he said.
"We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge."
You know it has been happening and will continue to happen.
It all started with the "Cotton Gin" in 1794.
The cotton gin is a device for removing the seeds from cotton fiber.
Such machines have been around for centuries.
Eli Whitney's machine of 1794, however, was the first to clean short-staple cotton, and a single device could produce up to fifty pounds of cleaned cotton in a day.
Making it dramatically faster and less expensive to clean cotton.
Before Whitney’s gin entered into widespread use, the United States produced roughly 750,000 bales of cotton, in 1830.
By 1850 that amount had exploded to 2.85 million bales.
This production was concentrated almost exclusively in the South, because of the weather conditions needed for the plant to grow.
Faster processing of cotton with the gin meant it was profitable for landowners to establish previously-unthinkably large cotton plantations across the south.
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840.
This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power and the development of machine tools.
It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. It began in Great Britain and within a few decades had spread to Western Europe and the United States.
The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way.
In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth.
In the words of Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ...
Nothing remotely like this economic behavior is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility."
The period of time covered by the Industrial Revolution varies with different historians.
Eric Hobsbawm held that it 'broke out' in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T. S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830.
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