It is a title of a podcast from Freakonomics. It was interesting, inspiring, and hilarious, so I listened it twice as I was dring towards and back from Dallas.
Despite all of the analysis about how the “creative destruction” does good or bad to the macroeconomy, the nature of progress has always been held.
The things that are most susceptible to computerization or to automation with computers are things where we have explicit procedures for accomplishing them. They’re what my colleagues and I often call “routine tasks.” I don’t mean routine in the sense of mundane. I mean routine in the sense of being codifiable… But what you didn’t see computer doing a lot of, and still don’t in fact, are tasks that demand flexibility and don’t follow well-understood procedures… What computers have been very, very good at is substituting, or what we’ve been very good at doing with computers is substituting them for routine, codifiable tasks.
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I think people who are in general people who can communicate, can tell a story, can analyze and articulate, those are fundamental skills, much more fundamental than Java programming or how to operate such and such a welder, and they are valuable in almost every domain.
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Our system of income distribution is primarily based on the scarcity of labor, right? The most valuable asset you own is your human capital that which you expect to be selling to the market.
And, this episode also had an amusing ending:)