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posted by cmn32480 on Monday June 08 2015, @10:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-robots-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb dept.

Digital technology has been a fantastic creator of economic wealth, particularly in the twenty years since the Internet and World Wide Web were unveiled to the masses. And with non-trivial applications of artificial intelligence (such as Apple's Siri) finally reaching the mainstream consumer market, one is tempted to agree with pundits asserting that the Second Machine Age is just getting underway.

But Yale ethicist Wendell Wallach argues that growth in wealth has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in income inequality; for example, stock ownership is now concentrated in the hands of a relative few (though greater than 1 percent). The increase in GDP has not led to an increase in wages, nor in median inflation-adjusted income. Furthermore, Wallach says technology is a leading cause of this shift, as it displaces workers in occupation after occupation more quickly than new career opportunities arise.

This piece led to the latest iteration of the 'will robots take all of our jobs' debate, this time on Business Insider, with Jim Edwards arguing that the jobs lost tended to be of the mindless and repetitive variety, while the increase in productive capacity has led to the creation of many new positions. This repeated earlier cycles of the industrial revolution and will be accelerated in the decades ahead. Edwards illustrated his point with a chart of UK unemployment with a trend line (note: drawn by Edwards) in a pronounced downward direction over the past 30 years. John Tamny made a similar point in Forbes last month.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 08 2015, @02:49PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday June 08 2015, @02:49PM (#193672) Journal

    Perhaps the key to the future is decentralized industrial production?

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @04:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @04:29PM (#193712)

    Go show me how you can build a CPU with billions of transistors with decentralized industrial production. A CPU is built and assembled in many places, but it's more of interdependent than decentralized.

    If "decentralized industrial production" is key to the future, it's more likely the key to a dystopic future.

    A dystopia where modern civilization collapses/falls apart and Intel, etc can no longer make CPUs/planes/cars/whatever because too many of the required dependency chains are broken. Go look at all of the dependencies of building some reasonably complicated modern tech - clean water, clean electricity, various metals and parts from all over the world, stuff made in China/Thailand/Israel/etc, stuff assembled in Malaysia/Puerto Rico/etc.

    Then you have decentralized industrial production AKA making your own stuff from scratch.

    Analogy - it's like a human body dying because of some important stuff failing and the body rotting (all the bacteria and fungi are doing the "decentralized production" on the corpse). The heart, kidneys, brain, liver will not work and will never work again- those "factories" can't get started. You need to grow a new body from scratch and wait for it to grow back.

    See also how NASA has forgotten how to build stuff like the Saturn V. If something kills off much of the "ecosystem" you can no longer build a lot of stuff - all the suppliers making the little bits and pieces stop doing it or even vanish completely. The materials and "magic" mixes/ratios might be forgotten.
    http://amyshirateitel.com/2011/04/03/the-lost-art-of-the-saturn-v/ [amyshirateitel.com]

    When the robots are building most of the stuff and 0.001% are keeping the robots going and the rest are oblivious to how things work, things will get even more fragile.