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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 Thexalon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @02:54PM
And the answer to that question is basically the argument that Karl Marx made over a century ago: It's a matter of who controls the means of production, in this case the robots that do all the work so that people don't have to.
There are 3 groups of people that could conceivably control the robots:
1. Their owners. That's who controls them now, and so if nothing changes, they win.
2. The government, if they use the power of taxation or force to take them from the owners.
3. The geeks, if they use their technical skills to wrangle control of the robots from both their current owners and the government.
Regardless of who has control of the robots, what they do with them will have everything to do with how magnanimous they're feeling and how much opposition they are facing. If they aren't facing much opposition and are not magnanimous, then they'll "discard" the opposition until only those in the class that control the robots are left. If they are facing a lot of opposition and are not magnanimous, then expect to see armies of battle droids or ED-209 in play. If they are feeling magnanimous, then we'll head towards socialism with perhaps a universal basic income and maybe a few hours a week of work per person for the people that want a bit of extra cash to supervise and maintain the robots.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.