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posted by takyon on Wednesday February 14 2018, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the nostradamus dept.

Bain consultants' macro trends department have released a report examining trends in demographics, automation and inequality to produce a set of predictions.

This kind of report seems to be all over the place these days, but this one seems more detailed and perhaps a little less optimistic than most.

In the US, a new wave of investment in automation could stimulate as much as $8 trillion in incremental investments and abruptly lift interest rates. By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, hitting middle- to low-income workers the hardest. As investments peak and then decline—probably around the end of the 2020s to the start of the 2030s—anemic demand growth is likely to constrain economic expansion, and global interest rates may again test zero percent. Faced with market imbalances and growth-stifling levels of inequality, many societies may reset the government's role in the marketplace.

They predict that governments will assume a larger role in markets to combat inequality and boost demand, but will our corporate overlords decide that's in their interests, or continue to squeeze the lower and middle classes forever?

Related: Humans Are Underrated
Douglas Coupland: "The Nine to Five is Barbaric"
Survey Says AI Will Exceed Human Performance in Many Occupations Within Decades
More Than 70% of US Fears Robots Taking Over Our Lives, Survey Finds
The Future of Work Is Uncertain, Schools Should Worry Now
The Venus Project and the Quest for a Socially Engineered Future
Skilled Manufacturing Workers in Demand in the U.S.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:36PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:36PM (#637858)

    Oh good, glad I'm wrong about you. Must have been all your conspiracy level pushback that gave me the wrong impression.

    As apparent here your basic grasp of scientific deduction is still shaky, should've taken more general-ed and science courses. If cloud cover increases enough to plummet temperatures then we could end up with massive snowfall. Snow is quite reflective, so enough snowfall and you no longer need cloud cover to keep the albedo up and you can get a runaway snowball earth. Perhaps we'd just reach an equilibrium and not go to either hot/cold extreme, perhaps not.

    If you want to see the dramatic evidence just look up weather patterns around the globe, the average global temp increase, etc.

    Oh, I wasn't gonna nitpick but oh well. All your posts are from the last year, with 2014 being the earliest but "Ok, where's the demonstration? Sure, I grant that global warming could be a really serious problem. But I'd expect actual evidence of this problem to be out there, not merely the usual assortment of talk and confirmation bias gimmicks." So you understood the potential for a problem but at that point you were still in the process of coming to grips with it. Did a few years really give you the data you needed? Or was that merely the time it took your brain to work past the conservative targeted propaganda?

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:29AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:29AM (#637996) Journal

    If cloud cover increases enough to plummet temperatures then we could end up with massive snowfall.

    It wouldn't because as you claimed, cloud cover would decline, if temperatures dropped. You can't have it both ways.