Reddit mentions of Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

Could always copy freestyle chess and start playing freestyle Go.

I might recommend a book called Average Is Over. I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, but he makes a very compelling argument that the future will effectively belong to those that team up with AIs most effectively.

https://www.amazon.ca/Average-Over-Powering-America-Stagnation/dp/0525953736

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

The widening gap between rich and poor means dealing with one big, uncomfortable truth: If you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom.

The global labor market is changing radically thanks to growth at the high end—and the low. About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.

Your labor vs. automation question is kind of a Luddite fallacy. But, the idea that a gap of skill in labor will increase over time is an interesting one. Read Tyler Cowen's Average Is Over for more on that.

As for basic income, that is how it would work. Welfare economics rests on taxing to pay for a benefit. By no means is basic income ideal, but it is a massive improvement over the current welfare system, so long as it acts a replacement and not an addition. Less waste on bureaucracy, and more benefit to the intended recipients of welfare policies.

Edit: Including a link to a podcast w/ Cowen about "average" http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html

I found this book interesting, though at times a bit tedious. In part II it does expand very thoroughly on the subject of human+computer chess competition and tries to draw this analogy out to other industries and applications.

Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen

MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have a response:

http://www.ted.com/talks/erik_brynjolfsson_the_key_to_growth_race_em_with_em_the_machines?language=en

Basically, they suggest that we "race with the machines" instead of against them.

Effectively, what they mean is that individual humans and teams of humans need to harness the power of computing.

They suggest that human+computer is better than individual human or individual super computer alone.

Economist & blogger Tyler Cowen suggests the same thing in his book 'Average is Over'

The best stereotype to describe your question is "millennial".

It is silly to put a value-judgement on neutral observations such as "more conscientious" just because you decided that gender is not a valid category of analysis. You may say "no, there is no such research", or "I disagree with the research", but the moralistic standpoint doesn't make any sense. It's sort of like getting upset about buckets and cabbages. Here's the research I mentioned: https://www.amazon.com/Average-Over-Powering-America-Stagnation/dp/0525953736

I will try to make this short and sweet. (I failed)

What you're talking about is tongue-in-cheek referred to as "The Rise of the Robots" in the economic and technological discourse. To be clear, it's not so much that robots will "take people's jobs" so much as having robots do those jobs will be more cost-effective than having humans do them at a politically acceptable wage.

The thing to understand about technological progress and automation is that all of the previous waves of industrialization (the so-called "first" and "second" industrial revolutions) all involved technology that was complementary to unskilled labor. Whereas before a man would have likely done hard labor out on the farm, because of industrialization one man with farming equipment could do the work of dozens or hundreds before. This freed up labor to go work in efficient assembly lines. So previous waves of industrialization were consistent with high demand for low-skilled labor and thus, rising wages at the low-end. When your grandpa talks about how back in his day you could graduate high school and then go work at the factory or mill or whatever, that's what he's talking about.

Why was this? Well, to summarize this Brad DeLong post, previous industrial technologies were able to substitute for brute force, but they still required a human brain to serve as a sort of "cybernetic control loop," which is to say, you still needed crane operators, tractor drivers, assembly line workers, truck drivers, retail and fast food employees, etc.

So for a long time people such as the Luddites have protested that labor-saving devices were "taking their jobs." Economists have long regarded those fears as unfounded. On the contrary, labor-saving machines freed up labor to be put to other uses. The transition period could be painful as businesses rise and fall and people find themselves in and out of work, but the greater prosperity gained thereby was more than worth it.

But now, we seem to be entering a "Third Industrial Revolution." McAfee and Brynjolfsson call it The Second Machine Age in their book. What separates the current round of automation from previous ones is that they are substitutes for low-skilled labor rather than complements to it. Each passing year we seem to be getting closer and closer to the point where smart computers can drive cars and trucks, run warehouses, stores, farms, and factories, run fast food restaurants, either by themselves or almost entirely by themselves. In fact there is a running joke in certain circles that "a modern manufacturing plant only has two employees: a man and a dog. The man to feed the dog, and the dog to stop the man from touching the machines." In addition, technologies such as the internet are creating a "superstar economy," in which a handful of successful people (think Taylor Swift or the guy who invented TurboTax) get ALL the moneyz because their "product" can be scaled up almost without limit.

What are the broader societal implications of this? Probably the best source to check out is Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. He argues that we will increasingly see a divergence between the roughly 20% of people who are either superstars or able to interact well with machines (data scientists, computer programmers and engineers, etc.) and the 80% or so who won't. The depressing implication is that many people are today what horses were 100 years ago: on the brink of obsolescence.

My own personal opinion is that we do have a non-trivial problem on our hands as we plow ahead into the 21st century. If managed correctly we can ensure that robots are by-and-large beneficial to most people instead of detrimental. This is a topic where it's very hard to tell who is a crank and who is being reasonable if you're just reading about it for the first time, so I'm trying hard to give you a balanced approach.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Tyler Cowen have both done podcasts on their books if you are interested in listening to them. Brad DeLong also discusses this occasionally on his blog, which in my opinion is one of the best econ blogs out there.

Hope this helps. If I wasn't clear about something I'd be happy to clarify.

Nope, theres a book about it, "Average is Over." Basically the middle is disappearing.