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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: 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.