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Today's 6th graders will hit their prime working years in 2030.
By that time, the "robot apocalypse" could be fully upon us. Automation and artificial intelligence could have eliminated half the jobs in the United States economy.
Or, plenty of jobs could still exist, but today's students could be locked in a fierce competition for a few richly rewarded positions requiring advanced technical and interpersonal skills. Robots and algorithms would take care of what used to be solid working- and middle-class jobs. And the kids who didn't get that cutting-edge computer science course or life-changing middle school project? They'd be relegated to a series of dead-end positions, serving the elites who did.
Alternatively, maybe Bill Gates and Elon Musk and the other big names ringing the alarm are wrong. A decade from now, perhaps companies will still complain they can't find employees who can read an instruction manual and pass a drug test. Maybe workers will still be able to hold on to the American Dream, so long as they can adjust to incremental technological shifts in the workplace.
Which vision will prove correct?
30 years into the Information Revolution and schools are only just now realizing they should teach kids how to code...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @01:44AM (35 children)
Smart parasites never kill their hosts. It's not an argument for Marxism but an argument against globalism.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @02:09AM (34 children)
Capitalists are among the stupidest of parasites. Look at the Kock Bros, the Republican Party, Pharma Bro and Papa John's! You never heard of economic depressions in feudalism.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday December 15 2017, @02:26AM (5 children)
Interesting, but... slightly inaccurate [wikipedia.org].
Keep in mind they also had big plagues [wikipedia.org] to... mmm... trim down their 99-percenters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @05:52AM (4 children)
Oh, yeah, plagues, barbarian hordes, famines, years with no summer, and worse. All external causes, not endemic to the mode of production itself. In fact, that what was probably the greatest weakness of the mode of production. Under-production. That, and under-investment. And a lack of innovation. Those, and having to pay 10% to a Lord for protection, and another 10% to a Church, for the same thing. So what did bring about an end to the Feudal mode of production, and why do the Dark Enlightenment alt-night types want to go back there?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday December 15 2017, @06:29AM (2 children)
Steam
Nothing rational, they just like coal.
De gustibus, magister, de gustibus... can't dispute them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Friday December 15 2017, @06:33AM (1 child)
Started collapsing well before steam did anything useful.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday December 15 2017, @06:38AM
Of course, the collapse of Feudalism started much early.
I'd say it started about the moment it was born, they just didn't know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:57PM
The black plague and the sudden collapse of the supply of labor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:41AM (13 children)
Now it comes out - Aristarchus is a feudalist. He doesn't want to keep the darkies on the plantation - he wants to keep EVERYONE on the plantation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 15 2017, @03:13AM (2 children)
Pretty sure that was tongue-in-cheek, Runaway. You should try it sometime; it would be less painful, I imagine, than your constant head-up-ass posture. And here I thought the Klein Bottle was an impossible shape...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @07:11AM (1 child)
WHy think, when you can know? http://www.kleinbottle.com/ [kleinbottle.com] Order your own klein bottle today, to remind you to always check your sources.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 15 2017, @09:42PM
Right, but...how do you breathe like that, is what I mean. You DO seem to love the smell of your own farts, but that's not exactly breatheable atmosphere. Certainly not at your level of toxicity.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @06:00AM (9 children)
Do try not to comment when you do not understand what is being discussed, OK, Runaway? Oh, wait, yeah, that would silence you; alright, carry on. But you see, a plantation is capitalist agriculture, with capitalist ownership of the means of production, and slaves or wage-slaves doing the actual work, but with a profit motive in mind. Feudalists want to keep everyone on the land, land they held by right of tenure. Strange that only exists in Academia today. Lords did not own land, neither did peasants since they could not sell it. Nice thing about Feudalism, no damn Real Estate agents, with or without their Gold Blazers and other marketing crap.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @07:13AM (2 children)
And, what difference does it make to the guy chopping sugar cane, whether the asshole in the plantation house calls himself a duke, or a landowner, a lord, or a master? You with your airs are in no position to comment on the serfs, or the slaves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @07:36AM (1 child)
I am groping you, right now, Runaway1956, exactly the way Hilary did, in 1982. You feel the tactile lubrication, the governorship of Arkansas, the difference between the explicit extraction of a tithe, and the subfurtuge of a profit makes no difference to you? I am telling you, you idiot, that as a resident of a "right to be fired for no reason state" that you could be fired for no reason. Peasants had tenure. They held the land. Not own, since they could not alienate. But hold. In other words, they could not be fired. They had rights. Workers have no rights. We should shoot them all, when they strike, or when they demand health care, or when they want to elect the wrong person. Kill them, I say. Slaves, Wage slaves, worse off than peasants, even than Polish peasants.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @10:15AM
Serfs couldn't be sold? At all? Really?
http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-life/medieval-serfs.htm [medieval-life-and-times.info]
I see damned little difference between slaves and serfs, really. Do you understand what "freedom" means? I need no man's permission to buy or sell property. I can change my residence to almost any place in the world. I can travel as much as I please (and can afford) and see almost all of the world. I can work at any craft or trade, as a freelancer, or as a hired man. (a few exceptions which require licensing, and/or advanced education)
I suspect that you have forgotten that serfdom evolved over many years. Early on, there was almost nothing to distinguish a slave from a serf. As time passed, serfs won some meager "rights", then more - but always they answered to a master.
Also - that on-again off-again droit du seigneur business. Throughout time, "royal" sons of bitches have assumed the "right" to use any woman who might catch his eye, and interest. Wikipedia claims that it was seldom if ever exercised in medieval Europe, but the royal class kept resurrecting it. So, again, no real difference between slaves and serfs. The master may use you as he sees fit, and no court will ever punish him.
A serf's life was in no way better than the working class in capitalism.
BTW - when did serfs win the right to vote? They didn't, did they? As long as the class existed, they were born into a life in which the master ruled their every day, and every action. The master decided who they would marry, how much food they could keep, how nice a home they could have, what work they did - everything. No vote, precious little free will, nothing.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday December 15 2017, @06:35PM (5 children)
At a loss. You do realize that with Marxism we have to kill all of the lumpenprolitariate or the system wont work, right? At least in capitalism those who refuse to work are still allowed to live.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @07:06PM (2 children)
Why won't it work? We have the same technology. It is just that wage labor will no longer be the determinate of income?
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday December 15 2017, @07:57PM (1 child)
From each according to their ability and to each according to their need does not properly account for those who will and those who will not work. When everyone gets what they need if some people are allowed to refuse to work then they are the new masters. There would be no incentive to continue to work if you can just drop out and get what you need, in addition there is no advantage to working harder as it is not rewarded with additional resources.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @08:13PM
Incentive, inscmentives! Are you a Republican, or a Microsoftie? Pro tip for post capitalist society: all "incentives" are perverse incentives. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Besides, the issue is the demand side, not the desert side. With automatization, no one will be able to "work", even if they want to!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday December 15 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)
Wrong. The reason they can survive in our world is precisely that our world is not completely capitalist (not even in the USA), but has some socialist elements in them. In a pure capitalist world, they would have no income, and thus no way to get food.
Well, unless they happen to own capital. Then they can be lazy as hell, as their money "works for them".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday December 15 2017, @11:55PM
The biggest difference between marxism and capitalism for the person who refuses to work is that while capitalism gives him nothing, marxism would give him a bullet.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:47AM (8 children)
The alternative to capitalism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century.
Now you can say that that wasn't "true communism" or "true socialism", but so what? If it is what we actually get when somebody claims to be implementing communism or socialism, why should we try again? Every attempt has caused lots of death.
Communism nearly doomed the Mayflower Pilgrims. They rejected capitalism for the first couple years. They instead shared the farming, the harvest, and even stuff like laundry duty. Some people showed up late to work and were lazy. That encouraged the others to do likewise, because why work hard to support the lazy? There was little harvest. Each winter, a large portion of the population died. They were soon facing what looked like the final year, given the amount of death occurring. Despite the previous religious objections to capitalism, the governor decided to try it. That year, people worked. Mothers brought their kids out to work; previously getting a woman to farm was near impossible. The resulting harvest was plentiful. Thanksgiving is really about celebrating the triumph of capitalism over communism many centuries ago.
Today, all around the world, people are still dying from communism and socialism. They die of poverty. They die when the government steps in to enforce communism. Desiring more of this is really stupid... unless you are just evil.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @06:02AM
Fuck you, you libertariantard! I got mine, and you can't have it! So go away! There is nothing for you here, you scavenger!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday December 15 2017, @06:37AM (5 children)
How many millions has capitalism killed? Remember to include the results of the military industrial complex and it's perpetual wars.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:47AM (4 children)
At least an order of magnitude less, and that's including the Congo Free State. Wars aren't particularly perpetual. There's been no wars between developed world countries since the Second World War, for example.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday December 16 2017, @01:14PM (3 children)
Never mind, between them Putin and Trump will change all that. You'll have your war sooner rather than later.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 16 2017, @02:09PM (2 children)
If there has ever been a US President who would pull a "Wag the Dog" move, it's Trump. It's crucial that he have little to no authority to just start a war on a whim. Other parts of our government have been made aware of this problem and it seems are actually doing something about it.
Putin strikes me as steadier and smarter than Trump. He's been in power for near 20 years now and has not turned to the nukes. As to the fighting in the Ukraine, the mainstream media takes a simplistic view that Putin's Russia is the evil aggressor, but other information paints a much murkier picture.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:31PM
That's not their job to control a sitting president. It's your job. Autonomy of the shadowy bits of government are far more likely to work against you than for you. Becoming ruled by the parts of government that are not accountable to you is not an improvement. They can start wars as well (and probably have started a number of them since the end of the Second World War).
Funny how you just had to say that about the Ukraine. The picture isn't "murkier". Russia wanted its sea port at Sevastopol so it took the Crimea. Evil aggressor status confirmed. As usual with this crap, people give actual warmongers a free pass. Unfortunately, that doesn't make Trump want to start a distracting war any less, does it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @02:20AM
You're reading something into Trump that just isn't there. He is mildly anti-war. I get it, you hate him for his values and his mannerisms, but he isn't a warmonger.
Our previous president bombed at least 8 countries, and his secretary of state was ordering drone strikes from her insecure Blackberry. She then started a tiff with Russia, the country with more nukes than any other. Now THAT is playing with fire. We were headed to World War III with Hillary.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 15 2017, @08:37PM
The? Why do you think there can only be one?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday December 15 2017, @06:28AM (4 children)
Why would you? No one was keeping track of them and hence, they are invisible. You'd just read about the causes and consequences. Things like wars, famines, disease, breakdown in social order, etc. Those get into the history books.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @07:02AM (3 children)
There was very little trade, and hence no economy?
Robots, khallow! It's all about the robots!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 15 2017, @04:26PM (2 children)
If trade exists, so does economy. Little economy is not the same as no economy. Plus, a big portion of the economy was through non-voluntary things like taxes and tithes rather than through voluntary things like trade.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday December 15 2017, @07:07PM (1 child)
Luxury goods, perfumes, jewelry, weapons, sort of like the economy in yachts today.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 15 2017, @08:25PM