I read this just before going to sleep last night, and I've been digesting it. IMO the 'why' in our development of technology is primarily guided by making money. It feels as if it couldn't be any other way, and I'm not sure that it could.

We get devices that save our time, but our time isn't actually 'saved'. Instead it is given to another activity, or in the case of work, increased productivity. I don't know if there is any way to change this.

This seems a problem to me: When we automate a toll both, a toll-taker needs to find a new occupation. The net effect of drivers saving time, and the lower cost of the automatic booth makes it hard to argue that the loss of the toll-taker's job isn't worth the gains. However, what will the toll-taker do instead?

As we are able to replace more human jobs, the jobs that remain are probably going to be of a certain sort. But, I am not sure what those sorts of jobs are. It's not enough to say that the uneducated are the ones at risk. In fact, as AI gets stronger, many professional jobs are going to be easily replaced as well. For example, instead of 8 human pathologists reading slides, maybe 1 human pathologist can work with 1 computer.

It might be difficult to say which jobs will remain, but the cross-section of occupations is changing, and will continue at an increasing pace. Some cultures are going to be able to deal with these shifts better than others. IMO, those cultures that have a flexible economic, political, and legal framework are going to come out ahead. This is one thing that worries me about the US. Political power has shifted more under the interests of existing industries, which are not very flexible. SOPA is a glaring example of this. The telecom industry is another. We have plenty of innovation, but it is being funneled by legacy systems into molds that probably don't represent the best viable outcomes.

We are succeeding at technological disruptions, but are we succeeding with the necessary concomitant legal, economic, and political disruptions? IMHO unless we can have a measured pace of all of these, we are going to lose what Odysseus gained. It's not the devices that we should be wary of, it's our ability to put them to good use.

I don't think that deciding "what is the good use?" is as important as the legal, economic, and political framework that enables a variety of uses to be explored.