You’re right, I devoted very little time to discussing what new jobs will be created. My primary purpose for this article was to encourage my peers to engage with the conversation. I feel like a lot of people I talk to about this right now just don’t even want to think about how the future might look, it’s too overwhelming and uncertain — so we just tune it out. Without a doubt, new jobs will be created. As Brendan Ross and Robina Maharjan pointed out, many of them will be high cognitive, highly creative jobs. But there’s a tendency to jump too quick to that optimistic outlook. It seems inevitable that there will still be fewer overall jobs.

I love your line about building inefficient monstrosities :) Probably the single most compelling argument for why the machines won’t take our jobs…or will take a very long time to do it.

Overall, productivity does seem to be rising with the tech progress we’ve made so far (this chart is from Rise of the Machines):

But I agree it still doesn’t seem to be the astronomical leaps forward we were taught to expect…still waiting on those flying cars.

Thank you so much for weighing in with your thoughtful, substantial comment. You added some important nuance to this discussion.