Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
July 31, 2020 04:18 pm GMT

Technology Will Erase Jobs- But also make everything Cheap or Free ...

At a talk about how technology is shaping the future of money, it seems counterintuitive to talk about a future where technology has mostly done away with the need for money to live.

But thats the future Peter Diamandis envisions.
Peter Diamandis is a Greek American Engineer and
CEO of the Zero Gravity Corporation.

Its no secret that technology is threatening to take away jobs. For all the talk about robots working alongside humans rather than replacing them altogether, automations higher efficiency, lower costs, and increasing capability mean eventually workers will be removed from the equation in many jobs.

No one wants to be replaced by a machine, but theres a silver lining.

The counterbalance to technological unemployment, Diamandis said, is the demonetization of livingin other words, pretty much everything we need and do in our day-to-day lives is becoming radically cheaper, if not free, and technologys making it happen.

The most obvious and tangible example of this phenomenon is, of course, the smartphone. 20 years ago, we had a bunch of different things that each performed a single function: a camera took pictures, a flashlight lit up the dark, a TV was for watching shows, a VCR played movies, a boom box played music, and so on.

Now we have all that and more in the palm of our hands. More significantly, though, we got most of it for far less than in the past. If Diamandis said, you add up the cost of all that hardware 20 years ago, youre looking at thousands of dollarsnow reduced to a few hundred. Similarly, the average smartphone being micro financed for $50 in developing nations holds millions of dollars worth of software.

After digitization but before democratization, taking money out of the equation for a given product or service is a key part of making that product or service available to everyone.

Below are just a few of the examples Diamandis gave of demonetization he sees across various industries.

Communications

If you dont have a smartphone or computer, you cant have your data collectedand companies want your data. They want it so badly that theyll soon be giving smartphones away, specifically in the areas of the world where the vast majority of would-be consumers arent online yet.

Entertainment

We used to drive to Blockbuster and pay a few Rupees to rent one movie. Now we can pay a low flat rate and watch as many movies and shows as we want each month. Or we can watch stuff for free; YouTube streams millions of hours of free video per day.

Energy

The poorest countries in the world are the sunniest countries in the world, and solar power is becoming cheaper than coal. That means ultra-cheap electricity in developing nations.

Transportation

When you own a car you have to pay for fuel, parking, insurance, tolls, and maintenancenot to mention buying the car itself. On-demand ride apps like Ola and Uber are changing the way people get around and making it cheaper for them to do so. Why pay all that money for your own car when theres a service to get you from point A to point B at a fraction of the cost? Electric autonomous cars will disrupt transportation even more.

Housing

Self-driving cars will change the housing market by enabling people to commute from farther away more easily. The housing itself will get cheaper thanks to large-scale 3D printing.

Education

BYJU's foundation recently launched its Global Learning. Participants are tasked with creating a software package that can take a group of illiterate kids to full literacy in 18 months. This sort of software will bring high-quality education to areas that currently lack itand it will be delivered in kids native language, in a context that fits their culture, at little to no cost to them. And a lot of Education Platforms as well.

Healthcare

Of all the industries listed, healthcare is the one most urgently in need of demonetization all over the World. Its happening through AI-fueled diagnosis and personalization of care. Deep learning algorithms can now identify skin cancer as accurately as dermatologists can. IBMs Watson was able to diagnose a rare form of leukemia that no physician could diagnose by analyzing data from 20 million other diagnoses. Genome sequencing will transition healthcare from being reactive to proactive, keeping people from getting sick in the first place.

A world where lifes necessities are all cheap or free will be very different from the world we live in today. What will motivate people to work or be productive if they dont need money for the basics? What kinds of new innovations will spring up from people for whom these resources used to be cost-prohibitive? How will social constructs build around wealth and class shift?

These are all questions well need to contemplate as technology continues to demonetize our lives. As the old saying goes, the best things in life are free, well have to figure out which of the free things in life are best.


Original Link: https://dev.to/gunjangiri/technology-will-erase-jobs-but-also-make-everything-cheap-or-free-2nk9

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Dev To

An online community for sharing and discovering great ideas, having debates, and making friends

More About this Source Visit Dev To