If AI Destroys Jobs, It's Up To Us To Help People Affected

When New York City introduced its first automated traffic lights in 1924, it was employing an army of 6,000 traffic cops to switch signals manually to keep the Studebakers and Model Ts from jamming intersections. Over the next two years, 92% of those jobs were automated out of existence. Yet most of the officers came out just fine, thanks to a retraining program that let them land new jobs fixing the very stoplights that took their old job. Almost a century later, we're seeing this pattern repeat itself, as it has countless times over the decades. This time the automation is coming from AI and machine learning, related technologies poised to make significant inroads on the 6.3 million jobs in finance.