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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:47PM
You're missing the cultural effects. Once the groups are segregated and apartheid enough, they can start "othering" the other guys.
It'll look a lot like the French Revolution. To some extent the piles of dead bodies were like corporate advertising strategies today, sure 90% was wasted effort, but nobody could figure out which 10% were really effective, so go overboard.
The agony of iron and nickel distribution sounds a lot like the suffering our public library goes thru with book distribution, or our public water utility goes thru with water distribution, or our fire department goes thru with fire coverage distribution. In summary, once something becomes a boring hidden universal too-cheap-to-meter utility, its pretty much not a problem. Oh there's careers and money to be made, but nobody's running guillotines over the local public library loan policies, at least not yet.
The future is here, just unevenly distributed. The future of the USA looks a lot like Rhodesia or S.A. except our fault lines will be economic not racial (well, not primarily racial).