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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @07:49PM (1 child)
libertarians [...] are quite against the current college loan structure
That would be counter to the "Privatize everything; deregulate everything" mantra of Libertarianism.
Being able to gouge a client eternally, with him having no alternatives, sounds to me exactly like Libertarianism AKA The Law of the Jungle AKA Only the Strongest Survive.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @08:31PM
Then you should be able to point to "L"ibertarians who have supported that particular system for other loan types. I'm not seeing any support for that myself, but maybe you have better sources.
There are plenty of loans out there, but only the student loans have this crazy lack of default. My impression is that once the federal government got itself on the hook for hundreds of billions in shaky student loans, suddenly a lot of students got fucked. This is the typical thrashing that government goes through every time it creates an exploitable public good (here, the subsidized student loan).
As someone who is partially libertarian, I wouldn't have supported subsidized student loans in the first place, much less set up the current crazy and oppressive system.