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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:25PM (2 children)
It isn't hypothetical, it happens to a lot of people. I'm sure you knew that, but when you use "hypothetical" you give people a way to pretend reality is different than it is.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:42PM
I didn't really get that sense from reading it. I figured it was a sarcastic jab at the whole notion of "personal responsibility" when compared to the real economic conditions the working class faces. (Especially consider the advantage somebody in his scenario would have if, instead of getting loans for education and transportation, they had been super-duper responsible and born into wealth that would enable them to pay cash for education and transportation. The moral of the story comes through loud and clear: be responsible next time you're up for reincarnation and pick a couple who's loaded (maybe not superwealthy, but consider that middle class really is 500k maybe in the bank and 100k incomes thanks to inflation) for your parents.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday June 11 2018, @05:53PM
I was using the "hypothetical" here to make it clear that while that story certainly could and probably did happen to lots of people, I didn't have anyone in particular to hold up as an example. Pre-empting an obvious challenge to my point, in other words.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.