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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: 4, Interesting) by julian on Friday December 15 2017, @02:47AM (12 children)
I believe much of health care is safe for the next 30 years at least. The elderly, and the soon-to-be-elderly, prefer being waited on and treated by younger human beings. IBM's Watson will definitely be able to diagnose disease better and give more accurate advice, but people will still prefer a flawed human with good bed-side manner. As with most things this is at least partially a cultural preference. However, the desire and need to be cared for by other living, breathing, humans is an evolutionarily-ingrained drive. It's a two-way street, also. As hard as health care can be it's a source of great meaning and reward to many people. It's why they tolerate the terrible working conditions and the immense stress.
The future for humanity is more people taking care of other people, taking care of the environment, and taking care of themselves; all while machines and algorithms take care of the economy. That's one path, the other is the pursuit of open-ended wealth accretion because a small percentage of humans are born as sociopaths who cannot derive joy in life without dominating other human beings and causing them discomfort through enforcing a hierarchy of relative deprivation. These people *need* to immiserate others (relatively to themselves) to fend off their own ennui.
Those people have to lose.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @11:18AM (9 children)
Amen. I don't know if it has been verified by scientific peers, but there was a researcher who used MRIs to identify sociopaths.
It seems to me that being rated as one ought to disqualify you from any kind of position where you might have power over other people.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday December 15 2017, @11:51AM
Amen indeed!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday December 15 2017, @12:05PM (7 children)
Wow, guilty by association much? There might be a correlation between impaired empathy and antisocial behavior but that doesn't make all such people antisocial. What you are proposing is de facto persecuting thoughtcrime.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:58PM (5 children)
You won't let a blind person drive a car. You wouldn't hire a quadraplegic to be the center on your basketball team. But you would put a sociopath in charge of a company or polity upon which thousands of normal, healthy people rely, because you trust his judgement?
Me, I think that's a big part of the breakdown we're seeing now, which is that the seats of power in our society have accumulated too many sociopaths. But maybe you got yours already and don't think there's a problem, as the other 99% of the population does.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday December 15 2017, @07:34PM (2 children)
Apples and oranges. A blind person is incapable of driving. A sociopath is capable of reasoning and determining what is amoral.
I didn't say that, what I disagree with is (a) your assessment of the root of the problem and (b) your proposed solution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @08:46PM (1 child)
Not apples and oranges at all. Both are examples of impairment that preclude the performing of their respective functions; that is why I chose them. In neither case is it their fault, but they are impaired. A sociopath is impaired in that he cannot understand the empathy required to make moral decisions. Test: Would you leave your infant in the care of a sociopath? If not, why not? If not, why would we leave a thousand infants in the care of a sociopath? Why would we trust one to hold the power of life and death over any of us?
Me, I'd much prefer leaders who are humans, not sociopaths. A leader should understand very well the morality of his decisions and carefully weigh their impact upon citizens.
Is it that you think politicians, MBAs, and bankers are moral humans who are doing the absolute they can for humanity, and that concentrating all wealth and power into the hands of an extreme minority is a good thing, or something else like the result of their decisions and policies just accidentally concentrate all wealth and power into the hands of an extreme minority of them?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday December 15 2017, @10:43PM
This is objectively false. If you instruct a blind person to drive a car, he would be physically incapable of following the road. If you instruct a sociopath not to harm a puppy, he would be able not to kick it. Were you for example to present me with a blind person who through some means is capable of demonstrating the ability to drive at the same proficiency we expect from everyone else, I will be more than happy to drive on the same roads they do.
Your assumption that people with impaired empathy will necessarily commit atrocities is factually incorrect, although a sociopath is specifically defined as a person who exhibits antisocial behavior, that doesn't mean that people who have the same fundamental brain condition are incapable of acting morally of their own volition. It is just as bigoted to assume that everyone who matches your thoughtcrime detector will exhibit antisocial behavior, as it is to assume that everyone who matches a certain skull shape would.
No, I think we shouldn't allow for the existence of power structures in which runaway power accumulation is possible. The greatest failure of modern politics and economics is the fact we don't have a negative feedback effects into them, and thus the second million is just as valuable as the first million. If the laws of physics worked like our laws of economics, the universe would spontaneously combust. Is it any wonder that we keep seeing one economic crisis after another?
(Score: 3, Informative) by t-3 on Friday December 15 2017, @09:11PM
A sociopath may be the best person for the job. Leadership generally requires some sociopathic tendencies to be effective (and this is why I will not be surprised when sociopathy is shown to be an epigenetic adaptation in response to social/population cues similar to homosexuality) Being nice and caring about others is a crippling flaw in many hard-choice situations.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:38AM
I certainly wouldn't put you in charge. There is worse than sociopathy at work here. Sociopathy doesn't make someone unfit to run a business. But people who get the idea that poorly understood medical tests can find thoughtcrime should be removed from such responsibilities quickly before they destroy something.
Create incentives that reward sociopathic behavior and you get more sociopathic behavior.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday December 15 2017, @08:55PM
Fuckoff these people ruin the whole world for everyone and then scare the peons into giving them more power. They'd be the first in line to tell you life isn't fair if you were the one getting fucked and not them.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday December 15 2017, @03:02PM
Yes, health care is an activity that will continue to need doing, but who is going to pay for it? and with what exchange medium, because what are THEY getting paid for? And similarly how are the tools and consumables (sutures, bandages, medicine) to be paid for, if most people aren't working? The situation is normally seen in terms of locality: a tourist destination depends on outside money coming in to pay for lodging and services; a commodity location depends on outside money coming in for food or harvested/dug natural material going out. But if other people don't have money either, how is ANY of the system supposed to work? The "Star Trek" ideal of not needing money, or even to make money, because energy is so cheap and matter replication is so cheap that everyone can have everything, is not the same as capitalists borrowing money at interest to buy production robots (meaning any kind of machinery, not humanoid robots!), which replace "lots of people getting paid" with "bankers getting paid so that robot manufacturer gets paid" - a net narrowing of the scope of money circulation. The logical problem, that there's no reason for the production robots to produce as much because not as many people can pay for the products, doesn't happen until well after lots of people have been laid off and lots of money is owed to the banks for having replaced the people with robots. The cycle of money flowing is as necessary as water flowing back into rain; money doesn't help anybody sitting in a mattress, any more than electricity in a battery, it's all about money MOVING.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday December 15 2017, @05:31PM
What people want, what they can afford, and what is available as the next best alternate are all different things. The elderly may want to be waited on by the generations that they robbed. They may get something much, much different instead.