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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: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday June 11 2018, @04:54PM (3 children)
> First, it means that you can save up during good years for the bad ones. You should be doing that anyway, but I'm not your mother.
Pulling a comment up the thread, and editing... I was doing "back-of-the-envelope" style calculation. For south of england (relatively expensive). For a family 2 adults + 2 kids
1. Rent - 250 GBP per week
2. Food - 100 GBP per week
3. Bills - 50 GBP per week
4. Car - 50 GBP per week
I guess that quite quickly comes to GBP 25k per annum (after tax). Rent is the big bad one and somewhat irreducible. Looking at UK incomes:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-salary-compare [theguardian.com]
about half of people with families are only just covering the basic bills. So "saving for the bad times" is really tough.
Meta: wouldn't it be amazing if the comment threads had a many-to-one relationship - i.e. you could reply to many comments with one reply. Might make thread topology complicated!
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday June 11 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)
Why do they get to have kids they can't afford and I have to wait? It's very unfair and unequal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @08:16PM
What's forcing you to wait? Or have you chosen to wait until you can afford to have kids?
In some situations kids are a form of investment: they're a cost now but in 20-30+ years hopefully they'll do better than you have and be able to take care of you.
I also imagine if the poor waited to have kids until they could afford kids, most poor would never be able to.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @09:09PM
When I looked I saw that the second decile from the bottom for two adults and two children was GBP 26.8k. Sounds like about 75-80% of such families are covering the bills.