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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 tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:17PM
Well, definitely you could assemble one PCB by hand, given enough tools and enough time. But it's like that jeweler's art - a cell phone made by you will cost $10,000 but the same phone build by a pick-and-place machine will cost $100. Not too many people will find fun in competition with a specialized robot, just as very few people race on foot against a top fuel dragster. It can become an exotic hobby, just as restoration of old $(anything) is today.
If you want you can create the whole DEC PDP in an FPGA. Then you can run those RT-11 and RSX-11M. Not fun if you need results, but fun enough if you want the process. You do not need to make an IC for that.
As long as the rich guys want art and the peasants want at least one thing in their house that is fine art grade, people will make art.
Most people don't crave for art; and if some housewife absolutely has to have a painting in a room, she can always buy a print for very little money. Given that the 20th century was marred by abstract "art", that print would be likely a work of earlier artists. It's a hard work, after all, to learn how to create paintings by hand. Artists had students, and those were learning the skill for many years. You can't expect a plumber to set aside his wrench and draw you a flower. Completely different skills. I can't draw objects, but I'm good at technical drawings. A friend cannot draw a 1" straight line without wiggles all over the place. Art is not for everyone, both in production and in consumption. I have no paintings in this house, unless you count a large sheet of paper with a table of Netgear routers that they sent me in the box with one of their products.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:36PM
"a cell phone made by you will cost $10,000"
And the problem is what exactly, once the peasants can't afford phones anymore and the population is split into two groups, peasants with no money at all (so they don't care if its $100 or $100000 they can't pay either) and billionaires who also don't care if its $10000.
Also its just not as hard as you might think. I can build microwave ham radio and computer stuff quite quickly. I mean, sure, if some billionaire who doesn't understand the value of money is willing to pay me $10K, I'm not going to complain. But if it takes me a weeks work at a very relaxed pace indeed and the rest of the peasantry is trying to grow potatoes for $10 / week I'm OK with only $1K/wk or even $100/wk. Permanent long term economic decline means deflation. If everyone else's income declines by a factor of 10, I'd be cool dropping back to only $1K/week again. 90s wages will be here again soon enough.
"Most people don't crave for art"
There's more to art than paintings on the wall. Just for "masculine" stuff along think of carved hunting rifles, hot rod cars, ridiculous pocket knives, sports collectibles (beyond mass produced junk)
There are people that live everything in their lives off the rack at walmart, although not many. They always got something... Collecting or custom something or other. Even the poorest rural dude has a custom handmade fishing rod or something. Maybe not much, but something.
"a large sheet of paper with a table of Netgear routers"
At a former financial employer they got a nice cutting edge mainframe and I got a promotional calendar poster that was on my bachelor pad wall, for 3 years after the calendar expired, until I got married and moved out. Still, like I wrote, theres a lot more to art than just paintings on walls.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:33PM
Yes, art and other man-made products may have value. But... in the society that we are discussing there will be no money. Reason #0 is that most of the people are not going to be employed. So how would the exchange of items of art work then? I'm not going to work for a year on a wonderful carved item just to give it away to the first guy who wants it. I'd ask for something in return. What can he give me if he is, like 99% of the population, not an artist? Does it mean that this trade has to be limited to the "productive" part of the population?
Also, futurists do everything possible to jump, suddenly and without preparation, from a capitalist society to a communist society. Even if we assume that communism is possible (not with the current mindset!) - the transition cannot happen overnight. As matter of fact, this transition is happening right now, and that's what the article is about. The transition is not managed currently.
If nothing is done then you will end up with people who own the factories, the designs, and the products. As fewer and fewer workers are employed, those factories would be producing goods that nobody can buy because they have no money at all. One possibility is to tax the factories and give the money to idle people... but then why would the owner want to build the factory in the first place? Also, those factory owners would be the de-facto government. They wouldn't vote against their interests. So it *will* end up with a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption. If left to its own devices, the crisis unfolds into a war of everyone against everyone.
It's also useful to see the situation from the POV of the factory owner. What are his motives? He wants to be rich and powerful. But is there any value in such things when robots can make anything you want for free? Well, some people - less ambitious ones - will be happy to live on an island that has a small robotic factory. They don't need anyone, they are not needed by anyone; no money is required. Those would be the happiest ones in this picture.
But if the owner wants more than that, what is his long term game plan? Obviously, he wants to retain scientists and engineers because he still needs such trifles like immortality, machine intelligence, and so on. Obviously, his robotic factories will be feeding and clothing those productive people that he selects. The rest is not needed; they can be exiled, killed, or otherwise cast away. Remaining people will work, but there is no need for money. The owner of the factories may at that point relinquish control, as it has no more purpose - and then the society turns into communism. But the most essential point of this plan is that not everyone is fit for a communist society. (See Маяковский [wikipedia.org], "Баня [wikipedia.org]"). This communist society will require constant pruning, like a garden, because some of the children of otherwise good people may end up being not so good. Communism cannot survive a load of idle, lazy people who, by their very existence and example, demotivate workers. This is a serious problem with the theory of communism, as it became obvious pretty soon (in USSR) that "a new man" is needed; one who is allowed to not work, but chooses to work because he wants to make his world better. Look around, in the street - how many of those do you recognize? The F/OSS world has, probably, 90% of them, and the remaining ones are amateur artists and writers. I cannot imagine a volunteer sewage worker, or a volunteer plumber, or perhaps a volunteer car mechanic. But someone will have - perhaps, leading an army of robots - descend into sewers to make repairs. Someone will have to use his human hands to make a pipe connection that stumps a robot. Someone will have to reach deep inside a greasy machine to feel for a broken gear. Plenty of work in a communist world will be still unpleasant - not everyone is going to compose songs and program in Go.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:27AM
"So how would the exchange of items of art work then?"
Barter is really old and archeology shows that pretty much everyone has decorated the heck out of everything until the industrial revolution arrived.
I mean, yeah, starving to death savages couldn't have time to engrave their stone axes or something, but it seems as soon as humans have a spare 15 minutes someone starts engraving swords and shields and housewares and tables its like freaking dwarf fortress out there in the pre-industrial world...
Realistically my ability to make money off electronics assembly post-capitalist era / neo feudalist era probably isn't too good. I'm no master carpenter but at least up to really high level apprentice quality so I'll make you a stack of axe handles if you'll give me a couple tons of raw wood, and I'll trade farm / garden tools and things (ranging from handles to entire wheelbarrows) to farmers for chow. I mean seriously, you can't expect someone who's specialty in life is detection and prevention of crop diseases or safely chopping down trees to season and carve wood? I assure you it would be a heck of a lot easier to chop down and hand over a couple extra trees or grow an extra ten baskets of potatoes than it would be for those guys to keep being experts in their field while also learning to be carpenters...