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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the dreaming dept.

Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.

Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I [Vivek Wadhwa] expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.

I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proven to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the planet's energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil fuel– and nuclear-based generation does today.

In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:05PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:05PM (#215487)

    there's no indication that we're building up a pile of unemployable people.

    Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL. Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people. I agree thats a great idea for that small little department. Its a disaster at civilization level. Like many things, something thats good for a very few is often a disaster if everyone does it. I'm just scaling your small example up to an entire country.

    That works great for one department at one site, but doesn't scale civilization wide unless you engage in ruthless genetic engineering to boost "everyone", or at least enough, to a higher level of performance and intelligence, so they can get a job elsewhere in the new "only smart people now get jobs" economy. Assuming there is enough economic activity after all that firing for there to be any jobs at all, surely they're only going to be jobs for, say, IQ > 120, where the criteria only ruthlessly increases each year. And the point is that we're not putting any effort into fixing the population at all, and even if we were, human biological generations are an order of magnitude too slow to keep up with the economic changes on the way. If people live for a century, and the economy is kicking out absolutely everyone with an IQ below 140 out in a decade or so, genetic engineering isn't going to save us. Now if we downsized all the dumb people in a century instead of a decade, we'd stand a chance if we actually went thru with the genetic engineering project, which doesn't exist and is just a pipe dream anyway.

    Here's a new theoretical discussion model. Lets get all the politics and theories out of the way. Lets talk about supermarkets. So the shelves are all different heights, but for the sake of argument, due to flooding caused by global warming, we're going to stop using the lower shelves. Flood water ruins little debbie snack cakes, after all. In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods. Agreeing to the above for the sake of argument... Well at first its no big deal. Midgets can't buy twinkies anymore, oh well. Then the bottom shelf gets higher and five foot people start having trouble reaching food. Sucks to be them, according to prosperity gospel if they donated to the right church god would make them taller so F those heretics. Eventually only, lets say, 5% of the population can reach the shelf thats seven feet in the air. Well technology blah blah it hasn't been a problem for past years so it'll never be a problem in the future, send them back to tech school for ladder climbing and ladder manufacturing class... Eventually the bread riots start when the bottom shelf gets too far in the air for "most" of the population to ever get food. You can tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps all you want, but when they're too poor and hungry to build a ladder to get up there, out some the guillotines and the revolution is on. Some things just don't scale, like assuming human primates have an infinite capacity for height (or intelligence, or training), or that they will accept arbitrary criteria for the rich to get richer while they and their families starve to death in a land of supposed (average) plenty.

    On average, one multi billionaire in a gated community in a 3rd world slum of 100K starving citizens has great average financial stats, although on average its also a pretty bad place to live, at least until the revolution. This is the economic model the USA idealizes, and is headed toward as quickly as possible. Its gonna suck. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, its going to be a continuous stream of "shoulda gone to college" "shoulda got more training" "shoulda had med insurance before getting sick" "shoulda worked harder" every step of the way, right up to the pitchforks molotovs and guillotines.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:15AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:15AM (#215663) Journal

    Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL.

    You treat it as a joke, but that is a true observation.

    Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people.

    And then creating new lower level jobs.

    In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods.

    Interesting model. The problem here is federal regulation strongly interfering with the ability of grocery stores to provide for their customers. That matches well the developed world's approach to unemployment, including the usual blaming of the problem on climate change rather than spectacularly bad government policy.