Tech community “dumbfounded” by Mnuchin’s dismissal of AI impact on jobs – Axios (Mar 24, 2017)
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in an interview that he felt AI taking Americans’ jobs was 50-100 years away, and it wasn’t a concern in the present. Predictably, a whole raft of tech folk who work on AI and are very much aware of jobs being lost to AI today reacted rather poorly to that statement. At best, this feels like yet another government official who doesn’t have a good grasp on technology, something that’s been a worry with the current administration since before it took office. But at worst, this means the government is far less likely to take any meaningful action on helping protect American jobs that might be lost to AI or to retraining workers so that they can find new ones if their old ones go away. Whether you believe either of those things are the government’s job or not is largely a matter of your philosophy on the proper role of government, but at the very least you’d want the government to have a realistic sense of what kind of impact AI will have on jobs and when, in order to make an informed decision.
via Axios
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.