These technological advances made me shudder about the potential job loss of the future even though the previous technological advances created new jobs.
Sure, there's no way that my profession and the great majority of jobs on the internet would be possible if we rely on human switchboard operators rather than relying on automation. That doesn't mean it will be true for the next advances in technology, does it?
If the cost of producing even the sort of dry, statistics-heavy content the program presently excels at was a primary factor then we'd have outsourced it to India or the Philippines by now. You'd certainly pay less than $10 for an article like this:
http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new-england/...
I'm willing to believe the underlying machine learning technology is very clever, but I'm also willing to believe a specialised toy script could produce similar results, even if you had to hard code the minimum winning margin for a "rout".
As for the Freakonomics comparison, they seem to have missed the appeal of Levitt: that his ability to posit a plausible causal relationship between two apparently unrelated variables. Any idiot can summarise "remarkable findings" based on spurious correlations.
The problem I have with that line of thinking is it encourages halting the progress of technology based on fear of the unknown, a classic human foible.
This has been a common fear in the face of pretty much every new technology. All past holders of this view have been proven incorrect. Do you want to bet that today (or tomorrow, or next month) is the first time in all of history that it will be correct?
Sure, there's no way that my profession and the great majority of jobs on the internet would be possible if we rely on human switchboard operators rather than relying on automation. That doesn't mean it will be true for the next advances in technology, does it?