Automation

For decades the road to success in the developed world has been straightforward. A university education, increasingly treated as a sort of white-collar trade school, offered people the chance to acquire specialist knowledge which could be used to secure a position lingering at a desk for 40 years. For those of us who grew up watching machines replace men on the assembly line, acquiring a degree was the way to escape this fate. In the digital age, however, the automation of cognitive labor has forced many professionals to confront a threat that once seemed confined to workers on the factory floor.

Daqing, China You may have seen clips of the recent Chinese robot Olympics, where a bipedal, humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint record by almost a second. Last month, Beijing hosted competitions in soccer, weightlifting, tennis and gymnastics, too. There have also been boxing matches between robots, which occasionally punched each other’s heads off. So far, robots can only really excel at one task at a time, so the prospect of a very fast, very effective fistfighter is some way off. Still, the Chinese government is deeply concerned about employment and has been far stricter at regulating AI than the US. That’s partly because of the differing economies of the two countries. The USA’s comparative advantage is capital.