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from the with-a-capital-T-which-rhymes-with-D-and-that-stands-for-Drones dept.
Gartner’s crystal ball foresee an emerging ‘super class’ of technologies.
Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business. This is Gartner being provocative, as it is typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.
Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html
What do you think of Gartner's predictions ? What will happen to all the phone sanitizers?
(Score: 3, Funny) by keplr on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:04AM
I'm sure all those fry cooks and taxi cab drivers can be retrained to be robotics engineers. I'm sure they've been saving up all their excess cash from their lucrative careers to pay for that retraining, too.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:20AM
Yup, they're only in disposable jobs because they're too lazy to take just a few classes at the local community college between their two jobs. it's so much easier to feel vistimized and entitled, than to actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But no they're not lazy enough to avoid having more children than they can afford, and then they cry about needing to earn a living wage...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:07AM
Man have sex drive. Woman refuse abortion. Couple has to hunt for income and can't refuse bad offers nor provide the time for retraining. Stuck! Trap!
If getting children was more along the lines of artificial insemination procedure where both partners has to make a commitment before any biological stuff happens. Perhaps many "oops" could be avoided.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:05PM
Like buying a cat. At least the commitment part, not the insemination part. Probably. Anyway the world is not running out of crazy cat ladies with 175 cats in her house so I don't think this is necessarily a silver bullet. Might help though, true.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:45PM
License parenthood?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:32PM
(continuing on my Poe's Law rant)
Well yeah, go ahead and overtax my god-given money to provide people with free contraception so they don't have to be responsible!
It's not like a home delivery costs money, and then they can give the baby up for adoption and get right back to retraining for a better-paying job, having enjoyed a few days of strangely mandatory free rest (free as in not losing your job, you shouldn't on top of it get paid to rest if you didn't save enough vacation). Why would society enable behaviors that are beyond my perception of proper?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:24PM
I think it boils down to that what other people do will affect your life regardless whether you like it or not. If these kids were left to their own devices like they are in some 3rd world countries. They would ravage and pilferage the surroundings. On the larger scale there isn't resources to keep 10 billion or so people happy on this planet. And most certainly not if they desire a decent standard of living.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:32PM
Technically, there are enough resources for 10B people, but if we want their children to have anything livable to grow up in, they need to learn to share a lot better and waste a lot less. But that's communism, and we know that doesn't work, because we took a wall down 25 years ago...
(my two previous comments were sarcastic, that's why I made a Poe's Law reference)
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:38PM
Jeeze, 25 years ago? I feel old...
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:05AM
Amazon's unskilled warehouse work are this era's equivalent of unskilled factory work (in the developed world, unskilled factory work is still unskilled factory work in China). Maybe unskilled warehouse work won't exist much longer but but other things can open up as that happens.
It isn't pleasant but the fact is that cheap labor is a substitute for automation and when as automation occurs the displaced workers may have a drop in wages wherever they end up. This isn't a solution or something desirable, it's just a mechanism that prevents the economy from collapsing in response to new technology. Some of the workers retrain, others muddle through and on average enough retraining takes place to keep the economy as a whole shambling on.
However, I think as a whole as we automate more stuff, a larger fraction of people are able to do more fulfilling work.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 1) by lentilla on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:50AM
However, I think as a whole as we automate more stuff, a larger fraction of people are able to do more fulfilling work.
I used to believe that as well. It is; after all; a logical progression. As I get older however, I get less optimistic. I see the same proportion of people doing fulfilling work and the rest are either unemployed or in insecure employment.
I'd be more convinced that people were being freed from drudgery if I saw these same people lolling around on the beach, cool drinks in hands. There is a finite amount of "progress" that can be made at any one point because that involves a synergistic confluence of situation, circumstance, and; dare I say it; pure luck. Humanity has no more ability to force the next breakthrough than a woman to have a baby in three months flat.
What is more likely to occur is that the lion's share of the savings made through automation will flow to the owning classes. In the meantime, those people that are "freed from drudgery" will free to sit on the couch thinking they are useless because nobody wants to hire them.
It's not all doom and gloom but society does need to readjust its expectations of what it means to be a contributing member. Rather than freeing more people to do more productive work, greater automation simply means that less needs to be done by humans.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:09PM
"but but other things can open up as that happens."
Build it and they will come. Same idea with graduating from university. A total conceptual disconnect between what would be really nice if only it were true, and reality.
If you really wanna degree in english lit or a PHD in chemistry, thats OK. Sure we produce 10 times as many as we have jobs for them, but they'll find something to do. Same concept with fire all the laborers.
Let them eat cake, like what bad could possibly come from eating delicious cake?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:45PM
>Let them eat cake...
When unbaling a traditional straw bale it comes apart in matted layers, with each layer being known as a cake of straw. Puts that famous saying in an entirely different light, one far more consistent with the situational realities. She wasn't saying "let them eat sugary confections", she was saying "let them eat straw".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:55PM
True but doesn't actually change this specific argument. "Ah well don't worry they'll find something to do" You know, like using 3-d printers to make guillotines and molotovs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:06PM
More and more of these people are occupying unused land and growing food there.
Years before Karl Marx published, a fellow named Henry George had the crazy idea that the only assets that should be taxed were *idle* assets. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dissidentvoice.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:42PM
Wait, are you saying the cake is a lie?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:20AM
She was saying no such thing, there are no straws in the French original [wikipedia.org], only brioche [wikipedia.org].
And of course she didn't speak English…
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:57PM
"enough retraining takes place"
Retrain for what? Especially if there literally aren't any jobs, of any sort?
This is well understood in our existing ghettos / inner cities. Not so well understood by soon to be former middle class people. They'll figure it out the hard way soon enough.
Build it and they will come / getting a degree makes a job magically appear in the field / theres always something to retrain into because I don't like talking about the alternative. Its all the same kind of thinking.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:57PM
And yet the opposite doesn't quite work the way the "experts" predict, either. It's not, get a degree in English and trust the job for that will magically appear on the other end that will pay you enough to service the $100K in student debt you incurred, but rather look at the industry that's burgeoning and get a degree germane to that. So, here we have IT. Everything in the world needs it now. And that's becoming ever more true as people invent new things to do with computers. But talk to your average software engineer in the US or Europe and they won't tell you they feel like their job is secure. They ought to, given how integral their discipline is, but they don't. Why is that? We all know why and talk about it at least every third week here, and before SN, on /., and elsewhere: H1B's, outsourcing, and VC-driven market bubbles.
The counter argument I have often read is, well, gee, if you were as good a coder as *I* am then there will always be a market for your work. To me, that's as specious as the Da Vinci of buggy whip makers claiming his livelihood will always be secure. Or COBOL programmers. Even if you are that Da Vinci of buggy whip manufacturers it doesn't guarantee that the company you work for won't be driven into the ground by self-absorbed MBAs who raided the pension fund to feed their bonuses and then dumped the company on vulture funds who do the same x2 and lay everyone off.
The fact is, we live in a time of iniquity and pervasive market dysfunction. Despite the Information Revolution, we suffer from imperfect information that prevent markets from clearing. We have legacy problems that prevent demand meeting supply. You might be the perfect guy with the perfect skills and experience to do that perfect job, but *surprise* you're an American and that job is in Bangalore and I'm sorry but you have entirely the wrong passport. You might be the perfect guy with the perfect skills and experience to do that perfect job down the block, but the HR managers bounce everyone except their buddies.
In the end, we're in the middle of an epochal shift in production systems. If anyone had asked the serfs at the twilight of the feudal system how they felt about their lot, they might well have said things eerily similar to what people now report: they work harder and harder, and get less and less. Now we're seeing the end of 19th century capitalism, with its centralized control and pervasive corruption. We're on the verge of every man having the means to grow, build, or get anything he wants for nothing or next-to-nothing. Companies will implode, governments will fall, societies will invert, and there will be blood.
Gird your loins.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:14AM
> I'm sure all those fry cooks and taxi cab drivers can be retrained to be robotics engineers.
DO NOT WANT.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:13PM
Imagine if all those out-of-work fry cooks and cab drivers were given a guaranteed basic income, enough to make ends meet. Many of them might actually be happy to sit at home all day, smoke weed, and watch "Ow my Balls". In this case, a job they might have otherwise gone out for would be available to someone else who actually wants it. Others might take the opportunity to go back to school, start a new business, be a better parent, or whatever.
No solution is perfect, but the more I think and read about Basic Income [wikipedia.org], the more I like it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:47PM
A guaranteed basic income needs to be accompanied by reproductive restrictions in order to be sustainable, otherwise the unproductive portion of society will expand exponentially.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:50PM
Have there been any research or studies that show this? I'm not aware of any. In fact, if anything Mincome [wikipedia.org] showed that young people were more likely to use the money to go to school. Additionally, it's been shown again and again that as societies tend to become wealthier, they generally tend to have fewer children.