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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: -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.