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from the ya-tvoy-sluga-ya-tvoy-rabotnik dept.
regift_of_the_gods writes:
"A study that was published last year by two Oxford researchers predicted that 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within the next 20 years, including both manual labor and high cognition office work. The Oxford report presented three axes to show what types of jobs were relatively safe from being routed by robots and software; those requiring high levels of social intelligence (public relations), creativity (scientist, fashion designer), or perception and manipulation (surgeon) were less likely to be displaced.
This further obsolescence of jobs due to automation may have already begun. The Financial Times describes an emerging wave of products and services from algorithmic-intensive, data-rich tech startups that will threaten increasing numbers of jobs including both knowledge and blue collar workers. The lead example is Kensho, a startup founded by ex-Google and Apple engineers that is building an engine to estimate the impact of real or hypothetical news items on security prices, with questions posed in a natural language. Specialist knowledge workers in many other fields, including law and medicine, could also be at risk. At lower income levels, the dangerous are posed by increasingly agile and autonomous robots, such as those Amazon uses to staff some of its fulfillment warehouses.
(Score: 1) by RedBear on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:54PM
Predictions always assume that the people who own everything are as big-hearted and logical as the people making the predictions. Turns out in the real world it doesn't work that way. Now we work 40 hours and get paid the equivalent of 20 hours while the rest of the profit goes right into the owner's/shareholder's pocket.
Every time this issue comes up most of the commenters start shouting about broken window fallacies and how new job categories will magically appear to replace all that is lost. But the Luddites were not wrong. As the automation machines and AIs get smarter and more generalized, they replace human jobs faster and faster. Eventually the process will collapse. We can't just keep inventing whole new categories of jobs. In order for you to pay other people to do things for you, you first have to have some sort of gainful employment of your own. If everything from agriculture and manual labor all the way up to service jobs are all 100% automated/robotic, what is left for the basis of human employment? I have never actually seen anyone come up with a plausible new job category to replace the current service/information job class that we are currently depending on now that manufacturing is basically dead.
Even more importantly, you all underestimate the abject hatred that the owners of everything have for being forced to employ other human beings for non-zero wages. Long before we have true generalized humanoid robots capable of economically replacing all non-creative human labor, the ultra-wealthy owners will have already invested in various forms of automation technology just for the sheer pleasure of being able to lay off almost all their human workers. EVEN IF IT COSTS MORE to pay for the robots and maintenance than it does to pay humans to do the same job. Employers hate the mooching, ahem, working class that much. And it will be their downfall, and the downfall of the entire economy as most of the 99% end up unemployed and unable to purchase any of the goods made in the robotic factories, no matter how cheap they are. I really don't understand how the wealthy believe they'll be able to maintain a stable economy without a stable middle class.
We already have 20% unemployment for, what was it, everyone making less than $120,000 or something? Meanwhile all the upper classes are almost fully employed. If the wealthy folks keep letting things get worse and keep automating away low-end jobs, eventually we'll have 50% unemployment of everyone under $1,000,000 income and some rich fucker will spew the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" on Fox News and the working population will have a light bulb moment and there will be a complete meltdown of our society. Short of exterminating all the lower classes and reducing the population by about 90%, I cannot figure a way around this unless we convert to socialism and wealth sharing and minimum guaranteed incomes. You know, things that the power elite will never allow to happen while they're alive.
When automation has become so good that we can now build factories that would have employed a thousand people a few decades ago and now only employ 30 people, yeah, automation is definitely threatening not just jobs but our ability to maintain a stable economy and society. Which makes me sad, because like any good geek I grew up loving robots and thinking they were a good thing that could help us immensely. But now, looking at the way human nature works in the real world, I don't see how they can be anything but a severe detriment to human society that may end up completely collapsing the world economy sometime in the next 100 years as the humanoid robot comes asymptotically closer to perfect usability and affordability.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:19AM
Darn those owners. Those evil Mom and Pop owners who cackle diabolically all the way to the bank. Wait, you mean they're not? Like, a lot of self-employed people are actually not flush? Crazy. And the big corporations, their stockholders are often not very wealthy people? Bizarre.
Reality check: there isn't some super secret cabal of rich capitalist fat cats who are blackballing you from their club because you went to the wrong school. If your work is genuinely worth all that much, you can get paid for it. You just have to figure out how best to get there. Maybe you need to moonlight. Maybe you need to incorporate. Maybe you need to specialise. Whatever you need to do, sitting on your hands and crying because the big bad conspiracy is holding you down sure as hell isn't working.
Sure, the Luddites weren't wrong. The bar for being usefully employable is rising, because the competition is getting consistently tougher. However, this fact doesn't require someone twirling his waxed moustache while servants brush off his top hat and polish his boots and thank their lucky stars that they have employment at all. It's a simple, morally neutral fact that some things are more efficient than others.
Now I can authoritatively say that you are just plain out to lunch. I own a business. I do not abjectly hate the idea of employing people. As a matter of sheer necessity, I prefer to spend five bucks rather than ten, and get free rather than cheap where I can. But this is everybody in all walks of life. This is why businesses advertise sale prices and cheaper products.
You ascribe to malice what is usually a set of decisions based on economic realities (I can hire people for twice what machines cost and go broke, or buy machines and hire fewer people to get the job done cheaply) or, more frequently, red tape (I can spend hour upon hour dealing with OSHA and the NLRB and every other alphabet soup agency in town, or a few minutes talking to a machinist) which isn't even dictated by the business owners in the first place.
Reality check: I'd be delighted to hire lots of people, and occasionally I do bring people in on temporary contracts for big jobs, but in the real world I use machines not because I hate people, but because I don't want to go broke hiring people as an act of charity.
I don't know who this shadowy, faceless power elite is, but I can offer you some solace. I, for one, have absolutely no problem with a minimum guaranteed income. Make it nationwide. Every citizen gets a weekly or monthly stipend which starts at the poverty line, and includes such additional costs as could be meaningfully included, such as health insurance costs or whatever. Just one condition: tear down all the idiotic, inefficient, stultifying red tape we have wrapped around all the things which the minimum income would replace. Food stamps? Gone. Disability? History. Minimum wage? Gone (because the living wage argument vanishes when you have a guaranteed minimum income). EIC? Gone. Supplementals? Gone. Unemployment insurance? History as well. Because you don't need these things - everyone has the same guarantee.
Citizens only - and by dropping the wage floor to nil, we incidentally stop low income immigration in its tracks, since immigrants don't get the minimum guarantee, and the minimum wage no longer exists.
There you are: a solution to exploitative immigration and the strangling of the indigent and the vast overhead of the federal red tape in one tidy package, courtesy of one of those evil people who has the effrontery to actually own a business.
You're welcome.
Your prediction is wrong on so many levels it hurts.
Robots take energy. Energy inputs are, in the long run, getting more expensive. Robots are not a limitless source of production.
Governments are well aware of the risk of popular risings, so some kind of backstop against human desperation and misery is necessary, and they know it.
Human employment may dwindle at the lowest end of the chain, but there are non-socialist responses to that which are quite functional. If you don't want to hand everyone a stipend with no consequences or oversight, add a working side effect to it - if you're paying for the people, you might as well make them dig ditches and pick up trash. Efficient? No. Socially justifiable? Yes.
You can't just draw a straight line based on current trends and assume everything will keep going that way. As a good geek, you should know this.
(Score: 1) by RedBear on Tuesday March 11 2014, @08:12AM
I didn't read through your whole response but I skimmed through it and I can tell you very simply that while you may be a capitalist you are a flaming leftist liberal compared to the sort of ultra-conservative a-holes that I'm talking about. I mean, you even agree that a minimum guaranteed wage might become necessary. You're not even on the same philosophical planet as the people I'm talking about. And just because you aren't one of them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Human greed will trump anything good we might have been able to do with mass automation. But I will be happy to eat my words if in twenty years you can still come back and tell me I'm wrong. Maybe we'll find some way to weed out the ultra-greedy members of our society. I'm not going to be holding my breath in the meantime.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ