Two of the speakers at this year’s Thinking Digital conference, Tony Hey a former vice president of Microsoft Research and Luciano Floridi Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, both argued that fears over AI are overblown.
But interestingly they both believe increasing automation will result in a very significant and permanent rise in unemployment as more and more jobs are rendered obsolete by technology. They both argue that society will need to deal with this through some kind of basic income mechanism as well as a big pick up in educational attainment.
It seems like the basic income is an idea whose time is fast approaching.