The Rise of the Thought Leader
I was recently at a conference run by a progressive political think tank. I was surprised and confused by the way some of the speakers discussed AI, "innovation", entrepreneurship, and technology.<p>They basically all repeated a number of the same points.<p>1. AI will be amazing, and will utterly decimate jobs in the future, though it was never clear whether they understood AI technologies or even the economics of automation.<p>2. Everyone should be trying to become an entrepreneur. Disruption is a panacea.<p>3. Technology is the future. But, they use about 1,000,000 different definitions of technology and give little heed to social ramifcations of some of the technologies.<p>4. Everyone in the future will work on a contract basis and this is amazing. They gave little thought to many of the long term benefits usually associated with careers.<p>5. "Nudging" will be THE tool of governments in the future, with little thought to the ramifications to democracy and liberal values.<p>There was such a small bandwidth of opinion and argument it was hilarious. They were basically all repeating boiler plate stuff you read in a lot of these "thought leader" books.