SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.
That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.
Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.
[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.
But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @02:43PM (15 children)
Which it is for the stock market - even with recessions included.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @02:53PM (10 children)
And where does somebody making minimum wage get that money to invest you fucking moron.
This advice is well and good if you happen to be well off, but a larger and larger share of Americans works a minimum wage job with no benefits and falling further and further behind as the cost of living continues to increase at roughly the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, most jobs have salaries that have not increased over time. If salaries were increases due to inflation and increased productivity, the minimum wage would be over $20 and hour. And businesses can clearly afford that, if they couldn't afford that, you wouldn't be seeing such massive amounts of profits by so many corporations.
We're in the middle of another massive bubble and it's only a matter of time before it pops and fucks all those minimum wage workers that are propping up the economy by producing goods and services.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @03:00PM (8 children)
Ya, khallow will be one of the ones with their backs against the wall. No one appreciates apologists of evil. Almost moreso when such apologies are shrouded in suppised common sense.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:32AM (7 children)
Let us note here, I've never advocated murdering people merely because they disagree with me. That includes pieces of shit like yourself. Let us hope that you come to your senses at some future date and never get your revolution, or that if you do get your murder spree, that you end up buzzard food in some mop-up operation by people who actually give a shit about the future of humanity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:08PM (6 children)
Ha, nice to see you finally lose your cool. You try so hard to maintain the calm rational appearance but you obviously mistook my statement. My prediction is your bullshit apologetics would very much piss off people who get desperate enough to revolt.
I'm so sorry you felt personally attacked, maybe read up on the French and Chinese revolutions and you'll better understand what I mean. Revolutionaries won't care to discuss the nuances behind your personal responsibility and series of contracts beliefs, they'll just see that part of your belief system rationalizes the actions that have oppressed them.
Just like you don't care about my message and focus on the supposed personal attack calling for your blood. The future of humanity? Ha! Yeah, you're a real saint.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:02PM (5 children)
I didn't mistake your statement. Open fantasies about executions are a common endgame for people who have nothing to say, but have to say it anyway. If your statement had any merit, you wouldn't have to hide behind a gang of imaginary thugs to say it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:05PM (4 children)
You can't say you didn't mistake my statement when I clearly explained it to you. I see your emotional reactions are now overpowering your rational faculties.
My point is stop siding with the exploiters, stop pushing ideology that worships pyramid schemes, and start understanding the problems of a massive % of our fellow citizens. If a revolution does come then history shows such apologists as yourself will be treated poorly. You can go back to bed and take your nap now secure in the knowledge that at least THIS anonymous coward is not plotting your demise.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 13 2018, @05:11AM (3 children)
Fine, I'll accept that.
I side with truth as I understand it. The problem is that this narrative is all screwed up. For example, the primary value of ourselves to our society is that our labor can be exploited. It makes no sense to criticize someone for exploiting our labor when that is what we need them to do. Your power to do anything in this world is severely crippled, if your labor can't be exploited.
Along those same lines, labor having a relatively hard time is directly a result of not enough demand for labor. You're not going to get any better by making labor even less in demand. That leads to the result that employers are the important part of the economy, not the employees, because they're the scarce part. I'm not talking about making big businesses bigger - that seems to be the natural conclusion taken, but rather greatly increasing the small and mid-level businesses. You don't do that however, by increasing the hurdles to employing people - that has the perverse effect of empowering the large businesses who have the economies of scale to deal with that crap and to bribe government to swing regulation their way.
As to "ideology that worships pyramid schemes", that's patently false. The primary ideologies I've supported are capitalism and democracy. They can readily support pyramid schemes, both of the shabby, illegal sort and of the sanctioned, institutionalized sort (such as public pensions), but neither are inherently pyramid schemes in themselves. Further, one merely needs to glance at the most successful parts of the world to see that the combination of the two has been very successful.
Now we get to the problems of the "massive %". We immediately run into difficulties. A large portion [soylentnews.org] of that group doesn't understand key parts of their own problems (for example, only 57% of US adults are financially literate). It's not my lack of understanding that threatens to upend this apple cart. I certainly can't help by remaining silent on their tribulations.
Huge portions of the world don't have the trouble that the US has. The US isn't even particularly bad for a developed world country, there aren't many doing better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 13 2018, @08:06PM (2 children)
See I barely even skimmed your response before remembering NOT TO ARGUE WITH A BRAINWASHED FOOL!
You are stuck in a system of thought and can't imagine beyond your self-imposed boundaries.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 15 2018, @04:08AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 15 2018, @11:54AM
In other words, you didn't even both to read it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @05:34AM
They don't continue to earn minimum wage, that's how. Merely knowing the basics of showing up to work on time, clean, and in uniform, plus a willingness to work hard can get you past minimum wage.
Which is incorrect even when adjusted for inflation. Once you include benefits [forbes.com], particularly health care benefits and Social Security taxes, the cost of hiring an employee is quite in line with their productivity as one would expect.
Complete bullshit. Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation peaked at $8.68 per hour [pewresearch.org] (in 2016 dollars) not $20 per hour. That's compared to $7.25 per hour today. And for most of the history (going back to 1940) of minimum wage listed on that site, minimum wage adjusted for inflation was lower than $7.25 per hour. So it's actually on the high side at present.
Also on an unrelated note, that report mentions dozens of minimum wage laws at the state and local levels. None of the state level minimum wage laws vary by cost of living below the scale of the state. That one-size-fits-all is a glaring example of the flaws of minimum wage advocacy.
Spoken by someone who doesn't have even the slightest clue how to run a business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:01PM (3 children)
Not due to growth, due to bubble blowing central banks buying corporate bonds and companies engaging in stock buy-backs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @09:01PM (2 children)
Sorry, I agree that sort of shell game is going on. But you wouldn't have a century of growth as a result. Something real has to be in there for it to work on that time scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @03:11PM (1 child)
Ya, the expanded extraction of resources supporting massive population growth leading humanity into multiple crises at once.
You are such a boob.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:44PM
Good. The original poster didn't identify a real world economy. You have.
If that massive population growth continues, then we'll have a future population die-off due to some of those multiple crises, so it wouldn't be an economy with a pretty future. You can't feed people with corporate bonds and stock buy-backs. So there is something real there.
I'll note here that the developed world would be shrinking in population universally, if it weren't for immigration from the high fertility parts of the world, like Africa, Asia, and to a declining degree South America. If those areas can't control their population growth (my view is that they will be more likely to succeed at population control than not), then they will bear the lion's share of the resulting die-off.