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Portentous changes to the work economies of India and the USA due to job automation by machines and robots continue to make headlines. Varieties of hardware and software automation are seeing implementation burgeon in both countries, as companies seek efficiency by replacing humans with machines. Wage erosion in areas previously unaffected by automation - including varieties of programming - is getting commoner while new, albeit highly specialized, engineering jobs are created. Both articles encourage educational changes mindful of these realities, though how colleges either side of the world can adapt to the blistering pace of automation is unclear.
The latest tranche of job automation news comes hot on the heels of Davos' prediction that machine automation will result in a net loss globally of over 5 million jobs prior to 2020.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Murdoc on Wednesday February 10 2016, @09:32AM
Here [technocracy.ca], back in the 1930s. It is exactly this trend which caused the Great Depression. The only reason that we haven't had a total collapse as predicted by this model is that we've manage to stave off the effects on employment by shifting it to a massively inflated services sector, hold on to incredibly wasteful construction practices and other industrial activities (where we require far more people than are really needed), all so that we can hold on to this outdated scarcity-based economic model. You'll note that the chart calls these "irreversible trends", and they are finally catching up with us. It simply makes sense on a microeconomic scale to replace human workers with cheaper machines wherever you can, because it saves you money, and "wherever you can" is getting bigger all the time. Thus employment goes down. You can't count on the classical economists to simply dream up new things to do all the time so you can keep earning your wage. And why would you even want to? The whole point of machines is to do our work for us, so why shouldn't we work less? Yes, they do also enable new work to be done, but it should be by choice, not economic necessity.
Seriously, it's time to start using our technology intelligently, and our resources efficiently, rather than the gleeful free-for-all we've been holding on to. I think of it like our society is like a teenager. When we were children, we didn't have the power to do too much damage, but today we have the power of adults, able to seriously harm ourselves and those around us, but we're still acting irresponsibly like children. We need to grow up and start taking responsibility as a society.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:25PM
Well the whole point of Capitalism is that it works without a level of intelligence that was unavailable at the time. It won't now switch to intelligent distribution of resources because its basis are the exact opposite. "The Invisible Hand of the Market" is just the aggregation of many tiny economic choices, it does not exist as a macro concept, but it was good enough at the time where doing a planned economy was unfeasible (see many attempts, all ending in failure). In our future capitalism is DOA. And the funny thing is it will drive itself to extinction given time.
It so happens that we may be reaching the point in our technological advancement where we could probably have an economy that is planned and manages to provide all needed things (probably through a crowd-sourced model instead of a room full of greybeards who would spend all resources on hearing aides and mobility assistance to the elderly). I do not advocate such a thing, but it may be inevitable.
Of course in order for it to work we would have to be able to do 99% of the work with bots (software and hardware), because I am sure we could only find a very small percentage of people once all external pressures of the system are removed (like you need to do a good job or you lose your job, income, place to live, and status in society) who would still want to work and not fiddle about just to punch their card, and who were capable of doing the level of work required.
At that point hiring people will probably be a very complicated process because there may be quite a few pretenders, who want the status of working but lack the ability to provide meaningful work to the system (image hordes of Ruby developers wanting to program the industrial system AI so they can look cool). Worse yet, the general population might turn into 70% SJWs who claim oppression because someone is not allowed to work for made up reasons 100243, instead of the actual reason of "they can't fuckin' do the job."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 10 2016, @05:36PM
Well the whole point of Capitalism is that it works without a level of intelligence that was unavailable at the time. It won't now switch to intelligent distribution of resources because its basis are the exact opposite. "The Invisible Hand of the Market" is just the aggregation of many tiny economic choices, it does not exist as a macro concept, but it was good enough at the time where doing a planned economy was unfeasible (see many attempts, all ending in failure). In our future capitalism is DOA. And the funny thing is it will drive itself to extinction given time.
I'm still waiting for that level of intelligence. And there's still comparative advantage. Just because some future AI can wipe your ass better than you can, doesn't mean that it is a better use of resources for it to do that rather than you.
The real funny thing here is all the people pining for the end of capitalism throughout this discussion, when it works better than anything that they can come up with.