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The animated graphic from NPR shows how the economy has changed over time. Interesting how jobs have shifted from production to services and distribution. "Peak Secretary" seems to have occurred in the mid 80's.
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The Most Common Job in Each State 1978-2014
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday November 06 2015, @02:42PM
And, by, "change," I mean, "unprecedented widespread social upheaval."
See all those jobs labeled, "truck driver"? In very short order, they're going to be automated out of existence.
Now, yes. We saw the mass migration from farms to cities a century ago, and the past few decades have seen the end of manufacturing as a career.
But, the thing is...farmers went to work in manufacturing in the cities, and the factory workers who've been laid off have either become truck drivers or are simply unemployed.
So what, exactly, are these people going to do to earn a paycheck when the robots are driving the trucks?
They can't go work in the service sector. Those jobs are themselves being automated out of existence -- it takes far fewer people to run a burger joint these days than ever before, and you only have to look at the insanity of people being on call at three of them with random schedules everywhere to know that there're more workers than there is work.
They obviously can't work their way up the ladder into management. Middle manager positions are being robotized at a breakneck pace, as well. You don't need an human to do shift scheduling or evaluate performance metrics; that's what the computer is for.
Same deal with other white-collar jobs. That's the whole point of the Cloud. We traded lots of secretaries for a few sysadmins when we went from the typewriter to the word processor, and the sysadmins have mostly automated their own jobs out of existence at the same time they've been automating all the other office jobs.
And Amazon is busy automating everything about retail and warehousing and the rest of the supply chain from when the item leaves the (automated) manufacturer to the doorstep. Hell, all their latest buzz is about drone delivery, which is nothing more than automating UPS and FedEx out of existence -- those truck drivers, right?
Even the trades are going to take an hit...with so many people out of work, there'll be lots of people happy to fix their own leaky faucets rather than hire a plumber to do it for them. Same thing with housecleaning.
But the transportation sector is going to be the wakeup call. There is absolutely no way we're going to survive as a society by simply giving the finger to all the truck drivers. It's the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back.
The answer is blindingly obvious: Tax the 0.01% down to the level of the 1% and the 1% to the 10%, and provide a comfortable basic income to the remaining 90%. And it's not like it's unfair; it's the 99% who first did all the hard work and then automated it all; the only thing the 1% did was be lucky enough to win at the stock market bets they placed. It's the horse and rider and trainer that win the race, and the entire field that makes the race possible in the first place...so why should the ticket buyers get a disproportionate share of the profits?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @03:17PM
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" Is that what you are saying?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday November 06 2015, @04:17PM
Huh? Where'd you get that from?
For all of human history before the present, the problem has been too much work and not enough people to do it. And the work has been true life-or-death stuff...people to be out in the fields taking care of the crops, people building shelter against otherwise-fatal weather, people gathering firewood to cook the food and keep those in the shelter from dying of hypothermia, that sort of thing.
But today we've got the opposite problem: too many people and not enough work for them to do.
Once upon a time it made sense that, if you wanted to eat, you needed money; and, if you wanted money to buy food, you needed to work.
But today that's already a big problem, and it's only getting worse at an exponential rate.
Not only do we not need people to be doing these jobs, we don't wan't people doing these jobs. But, no jobs means no money, and no money means no food, and no food means death.
So, either we start using starvation to kill off hundreds of millions or even billions of people until we've only got exactly enough people to do what little work there is that needs to be done...or we break the other half of the chain, too. You're welcome to have money to pay for your food and shelter and the rest...and, since we've got this army of robots doing all the work for you, we're not going to make you do the work the robots are already doing before we give you that money.
That's actually what we're already doing, of course. It's just that the 0.01% are getting all the money that the robots are earning. Why should the 0.01% enjoy all the fruits of the robot labor while everybody else starves?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by computersareevil on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:47PM
And truck drivers of all kinds are a demographic that is very likely to own firearms, and usually more than one.
So giving them the middle finger would hasten the revolution.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday November 06 2015, @04:18PM
I think he's saying that if you want to avoid the guillotine, you have to be realistic. Not every person is just going to shut up and starve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @03:35AM
That's why the guns need to be taken away.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @08:39PM
I don't believe it. It is safe to say you have never had a delivery job. We are a couple generations from that sort of work being automated. At best we might have automated vehicles that drive workers places so they can unload their wares. Think about an average food delivery driver. Not pizza delivery, but to restaurants and grocery stores. The route finding can be automated. The driving except in difficult conditions can be automated (we are easily a decade away from coming close to safe poor-weather automated driving). But what happens when the vehicle gets there? We don't have anywhere near efficient, cheap robots that can unload a truck under any condition, take the goods into a building, stock the goods, take inventory and proof of delivery, then move any dunnage and the like back to the truck. We are nowhere near that. Before we have automated driving jobs, we will need to automate both dock work (the far easier of the two) and general stocking work too.
Your minimum-wage workers keeping the shelves full at walmart will lose their jobs before truck drivers will. And don't get me started on how the hell are we supposed to stop theft and fraud. This automated driving stuff is a wet-dream for software developers, but for our generation and the next it wont be anything more than a novelty to be used in good conditions to move people.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Friday November 06 2015, @10:28PM
Amazon's warehouses are already mostly automated. Making local storehouses and delivery truck interiors follow Amazon's pattern will be trivial. Plus, Amazon itself is generally rendering retail redundant in the first place; Amazon is already automating out of existence those minimum-wage Walmart jobs.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:51PM
No they aren't. I'm sure they would love for you to believe that but just look at the number of employees and outside contractors at any given site filling baskets.
Are you prepared to buy everything you have in a warehouse surrounded by industrial robots, right down to gas-stations?
Walmart is eight times the size of Amazon and growing. Go look at a Walmart. Are there people inside?
You really need to get out of your mother's basement and see the real world.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday November 07 2015, @02:51AM
Ever been to a UPS or FedEx hub? last time I was, a good 20 years ago, it was already almost entirely automated.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:48PM
Mostly automated? Compared to what? People still load and unload trucks and modules to go on airplanes by hand. I am not well versed in FedEx, but working with and at UPS, the only thing that is fully automated is some sorting in large facilities. Small ones still do that by hand too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @03:31AM
There's a reason every useful weapon is banned.
(machineguns etc)
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Saturday November 07 2015, @08:26PM