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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: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:17AM
I think people work for three reasons: subsistence, to better themselves, and for a sense of purpose. While a future of abundance can provide for everyone's needs (not just food and shelter but also decent health care and education) it seems unlikely that any amount of socialist redistribution will satisfy everyone's wants and ambitions. And even so, there are plenty of retired people who are financially independent (having planned and invested properly) and still work, either at jobs or as volunteers, because they want to. Because there is more to life than being a couch potato consumer.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:54PM
it seems unlikely that any amount of socialist redistribution will satisfy everyone's wants and ambitions
That's exactly the problem. Socialism will satisfy your want for food, shelter, and healthcare. But what other wants may you have? Desire to wear uncommon clothes? Anyone can get those. Drive a special car? Anyone can have such a car. What no robot can give you is the power over others. It's a deeply buried trait that keeps humans forming tribes with hierarchy, instead of a flock. Tribes will be also forming in a socialist paradise. In the late USSR this was seen as rise of regional gangs. The universal solution to that was in working everyone to death, so that they don't get ideas. An idle society will have plenty of such ideas, and plenty of people will want to become kings - not because they are hungry right now, but because they want to have power to let others eat or starve. Plenty of today's crime in or near ghettos is aimed not at profit, but at personal gratification (those knockout games are a good example.) And there is yet another uncomfortable truth: some people are just too stupid to live (free.) Perhaps it's a genetic defect. But many crimes are committed not by Professors Moriarty, but by someone with IQ barely above zero and attraction to sadism. How will the socialist society deal with those people?
Some talk about art that should become a major outlet for unused labor and unclaimed time. This was mentioned in The city and the stars [wikipedia.org]. However the market for art is limited; being infinitely copyable (even performing arts,) the society would become quickly flooded with music, paintings, and other items that are mostly garbage. People will realize that not everyone is capable of art, and those who aren't capable should stay away, lest they be ridiculed. Pretty soon people will understand that their whole life is entirely pointless; mass suicides are likely. People, as far as I know, cannot exist without purpose and without work that leads them there.