What's the Latest Development? Artificial intelligence is
getting closer to replacing high-skilled workers, a sector once
thought to be beyond the reach of our technological abilities.
"In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the
economy that we'd never suspected possible—they'll be diagnosing
your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits,
making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing
stories just like this one." Following economic theory, higher
productivity in these areas will drive down costs, benefiting
society as a whole. What's the Big Idea? Just as the percentage
of Americans working on farms dropped from 41 to 2 between 1900
and 2000, robots are on course to revolutionize our current
labor market. Software developer Martin Ford was one of the
first to write extensively about the coming changes: "There's no
question that there will be new things in the future. But the
assumption that economists are making is that those industries
are going to be labor-