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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, 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.