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posted by janrinok on Monday June 11 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the cheery-start-to-the-week dept.

Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.

That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.

Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.

[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.

But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:01PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:01PM (#691449)

    Which it is for the stock market

    Not due to growth, due to bubble blowing central banks buying corporate bonds and companies engaging in stock buy-backs.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @09:01PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @09:01PM (#691605) Journal

    Not due to growth, due to bubble blowing central banks buying corporate bonds and companies engaging in stock buy-backs.

    Sorry, I agree that sort of shell game is going on. But you wouldn't have a century of growth as a result. Something real has to be in there for it to work on that time scale.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:11PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:11PM (#691939)

      Ya, the expanded extraction of resources supporting massive population growth leading humanity into multiple crises at once.

      You are such a boob.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:44PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:44PM (#692047) Journal

        Ya, the expanded extraction of resources supporting massive population growth leading humanity into multiple crises at once.

        Good. The original poster didn't identify a real world economy. You have.

        If that massive population growth continues, then we'll have a future population die-off due to some of those multiple crises, so it wouldn't be an economy with a pretty future. You can't feed people with corporate bonds and stock buy-backs. So there is something real there.

        I'll note here that the developed world would be shrinking in population universally, if it weren't for immigration from the high fertility parts of the world, like Africa, Asia, and to a declining degree South America. If those areas can't control their population growth (my view is that they will be more likely to succeed at population control than not), then they will bear the lion's share of the resulting die-off.