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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @05:09PM (6 children)
Sorry, not an American, who is the issuer of student loans, and what is the collateral? From the story it seems like you can never default on the student loan, is that right?
Is such an arrangement you can' get out of even legal, constitutional?
What happens to you if you just never pay anything back and just spend the every last penny you earn, without ever buying any real estate property or more valuable goods (e.g. rent place you live in, lease car instead of buying one, ...)?
Will they come for a pound of meat or what?
And, why aren't Americans fleeing to study in countries from which H1-B visa carriers come and avoid needing loans? If their education is good enough for H1-Bs to get a job, it is good enough for you too, and costs of living and studying are bound to be lower. Your parents or your gigs can probably save/earn enough for that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 11 2018, @05:57PM (4 children)
1. The student loan is backed by the federal government, but the profits go to a private bank.
2. There is no obvious way to have collateral in these kinds of loans.
3. Under current US law, you cannot discharge a student loan by bankruptcy. The rules are, you have to pay it until the day you die. They can and will garnish wages, seize assets, whatever they think they can get to get the money back.
4. Yes, that kind of "arrangement" is considered legal in the US. Makes you wonder about all that "rah rah Freedom" talk.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @06:47PM (2 children)
Some of the "rah rah freedom contingent" (libertarians, at least) are quite against the current college loan structure. It's not an inherent contradiction, just the usual vested-interests-and-path-dependence idiocy the US usually gets up to.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @07:49PM (1 child)
libertarians [...] are quite against the current college loan structure
That would be counter to the "Privatize everything; deregulate everything" mantra of Libertarianism.
Being able to gouge a client eternally, with him having no alternatives, sounds to me exactly like Libertarianism AKA The Law of the Jungle AKA Only the Strongest Survive.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @08:31PM
Then you should be able to point to "L"ibertarians who have supported that particular system for other loan types. I'm not seeing any support for that myself, but maybe you have better sources.
There are plenty of loans out there, but only the student loans have this crazy lack of default. My impression is that once the federal government got itself on the hook for hundreds of billions in shaky student loans, suddenly a lot of students got fucked. This is the typical thrashing that government goes through every time it creates an exploitable public good (here, the subsidized student loan).
As someone who is partially libertarian, I wouldn't have supported subsidized student loans in the first place, much less set up the current crazy and oppressive system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @08:16PM
Part of the problem is that the loan counseling to get a student loan lies to people considering it. They claim that it can be discharged by bankruptcy court, but I don't know that it's true.
On top of that, the interest for a government student loan maxes out at 10.5% which is absolutely ridiculous. How on earth is somebody supposed to pay off debt when they're only marginally better off with the student loan that you can't discharge in bankruptcy than putting it on their credit card that can be discharged in bankruptcy?
The unrequested increase in DoD spending alone could knock off a huge portion of the cost of college, or at bare minimum allow most college students to receive affordable loans if they needed them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @08:01PM
Commercial banks.
The student's hide, as co-signed by the government.
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