In the future, will only robots celebrate Labor Day? | Forbes

by Hallie Siegel

25 August 2014

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What is different about the virtual robot revolution is not that jobs will be displaced in the short term, but that the robots (or algorithms) will do something different. They will amplify and not destroy much of what humans do. While the car replaced the horse, it didn’t obviate the need for walking. Cars amplified the average distances traveled per person per year by ten-fold. Virtual robots will replace the knowledge-work equivalent to the horse, and accordingly we will see in due course a ten-fold growth in the intellectual ‘distance’ traveled by the average ‘laborer’ — and not just coders and Millennials.

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