Andrew McAfee TED Talk on robots and jobs

Andrew McAfee is principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management and the the author of Enterprise 2.0 and the co-author, with Erik Brynjolfsson, of Race Against The Machine. In this TED talk, he gives us his take on the impact of robotics on jobs from the point of view of a digital optimist.

To summarize, here is a quote taken from the end of the talk:

The droids are taking our jobs, but focussing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we’re going to do, I am very confident, is reduce poverty, and drudgery and misery around the world. I’m very confident we’re going to learn to live more lightly on the planet and I am extremely confident that what we’re going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound, and so beneficial, that it’s going to make a mockery of everything that came before.

Sabine Hauert is President of Robohub and Associate Professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory

Sabine Hauert is President of Robohub and Associate Professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory