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posted by takyon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the efficiency-for-you dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 10 2016, @05:36PM

    by khallow (3766) on Wednesday February 10 2016, @05:36PM (#302269) Journal

    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.