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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, @01:58PM
It looks like a very rough draft of an utopia, with many difficult problems just avoided.
Welcome to every religion, nationalism, or economic system our species has ever spawned.
Do the engineers think it fixes everything? Who cares, what matters is can it sell. Probably.
When you look at ultra-rich ivy league students, their currency is PUA counts for the alpha boys and holiness spiral SJW signalling for the ugly girls and beta males. Nothing really disruptive has happened by making $ no longer the currency.
Another way to look at it, is there is, or was, a multi-billion dollar industry in bottled tapwater. Yet, its not a "real" problem that there exists a glass of basically free tap water on my desk, its too cheap for my employer to meter tap water per individual employee, my home town has free water drinking fountains in parks and because I don't live in a slum they're not disgusting like in cities, etc. They'll always be a weird subculture of people still into bottled water or capitalism or scarcity economics, but they're going to be looked at kinda like the Amish.
Another interesting thing to think about is a century ago people consumed to fill time by actually consuming. Now its digital entertainment and media where they consume a couple watts (walk on a treadmill to power if you have to?). As technology improves, e-ink blah blah eventually a small solar panel can run your digital soma device in perpetuity with no effort. So what exactly is the problem?