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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, @09:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @09:32PM (#691624)

    I think the obvious rebuttal is that if the working class organized within a libertarian political system, the working class could demand a sufficient share of the wealth to act as the cyclical dampener you're suggesting. This would probably be a better and more scalable solution than using the political system as a means for working class organization. As wswswswswsws would suggest, this could be achieved by rank-and-file committees working in decentralized cooperation throughout the entire economic. The goal would be economic socialism (the ownership of the means of production by the workers) within political libertarianism (small laissez faire government).

    In fact, this is likely unavoidable as service jobs become automated away by things like self-checkouts, order kiosks at fast food places, and burger flipping robots.

    Where my supposed scalability runs into trouble is when the average human is no longer capable of performing work for economic gain. The working class would need to become a stock ownership class for full scalability. Therefore, the utopian dream may be a working class that is also the ownership class. This may be where strict political libertarianism runs into problems. But then I'd suggest some kind of citizen's dividend where every person is a vested owner of capital (company shares) from the age of majority as the implementation for a UBI. Devil will be in the details as always.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @10:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @10:53AM (#691852)

    Socialism implemented inside libertariansim is an interesting idea. Free people organize unions, guilds, trade groups, community governments, and associate or disassociate at will. The groups act in the collective interest of the members and survive or fail based on participation and resources invested by members. It would be chaotic at times, but also self-regulating.