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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 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.