The next time someone tells you robots are going to destroy our jobs, show them this
Studies like these usually generate headlines like "Robots are putting people out to pasture" (the Mail), "After the robot revolution, these may be the only jobs left for human beings" (The Telegraph), and "Robots will steal your job" (er, Business Insider).
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
That's because they're likely to create a lot of new, more interesting jobs than the ones they're destroying. Chris Dixon, of the Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently published this chart which showed all the typographer jobs that were "destroyed" by publishing software:
If you like designing pages, then you want to be alive now - plenty of jobs! - and not in 1984.
Here is an even better one. It shows how the film camera industry was destroyed by the digital camera industry, which was in turn destroyed by the smartphone industry. These data are of sales revenues, not jobs, but it's an obvious truism that there are more people employed today making phones than there ever were making cameras:
Credit Suisse
So rejoice. The robots are coming! And they have lots of jobs for us.
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