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posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:29AM (#11197)

    It's because I will be forced to act to provide some sort of logistics (which I am good at it) for food, shelter, and clothing. Isn't greatness usually thrust upon the shoulders of someone unwilling? I don't mean that egotistically. Just that I'm confident enough in my skill sets, and confident enough in knowing myself, that I could not sit by with inaction while my brothers and sisters fought for a better world for me and our children.

    If you are a techie, probably the single most revolutionary thing you could do is work towards a truly secure, safely pseudonymous forum with a troll-resistant interface. That is basically what would be necessary to foster the kind of discussion which could bring people together to actually discuss how to fix things. In a perfect world, not only would it be unnecessary, but the duty of guys like the FBI would be to monitor the discussion (you couldn't keep them out, practically) and to inform their masters of why and how the people are truly disgruntled so that they could fix what's broken. In the real world, their mission appears to be to diffuse and stifle dissent rather than address the root causes.

    The real problem with this is that the longer they put it off, the worse it gets until you have a truly monstrous situation at hand.

    Why will that happen?

    Our democratic process is broken to such an extent that Americans are almost 3rd class citizens in their own country simply because of the inability for our government to fulfill their charter and purpose. That purpose was to provide an EQUAL foundation in which we could all enjoy the ideals of freedom and the benefits of prosperity.

    I am not disagreeing (although I see room for disagreement around the description of the purpose of government) but I can't really disagree with the observation that the democratic process is showing signs of strain, to say the least. That description matches the sense of disenfranchisement which is typical of revolutionaries. If you felt you had a place at the table, so to speak, you wouldn't be motivated to support the flipping of the table.

    Government doesn't do that. They do the opposite, which is to serve monied interests that are intrinsically evil. Evil not by appeal to emotion or histrionics, but evil by definition; The monied interests only serve their short term goals while being perfectly aware of the harm they cause. The great tragedy is that it is most likely not a singular awareness at all. There is no Hitler. It's mob mentality. Only acting together with cognitive dissonance and the justification that everyone does it, and nothing can change, does the 1% act so abhorrently. It's broken the democratic process with flawed logic, fear, illusions of sustainable growth and wealth, and the more or less direct wholesale bribery of the EXACT people that should be above all that, the people that should know better, the people that should be the smartest and the wisest of us, capable of leading us and protecting us. The 1% has so fully pushed the political process from grace, that it wouldn't know the light if they were on fire.

    They are a virus, a blight, a pox upon the civilized world. We are not dealing with it properly, and at some point, we either deal with it or perish.

    I'm unsure that the 1% is a useful target. Depending on your definition, the 1% could be a fairly prosperous plumber, or a successful farmer after a bumper crop. It sounds to me as if you're more concerned with the political class, and the upper echelons of unelected officials, and the ecosystem of lobbyists and similar folk around them.

    Revolution is not just a possibility, it's an inevitability if we continue to be paralyzed and fail to enact protections, reforms, and a movement back towards the legal embodiments of our American ideals. This revolution has the possibility of being without bloodshed of any kind, and might not even meet the definition of a revolution at all. It could be an evolution.

    I sorely wish we did not have to wait 1 minute till midnight on the clock to act. I know from quite unfortunate experience (as do we all) that in the worst cases you don't get to appeal to God to get an extra few seconds. You can't stop your momentum if you try, and as causality is quite a bitch, you die.

    I've heard it suggested that the revolution will come when the ACLU and the NRA have both had enough. When they make peace, and the NRA becomes the ACLU's armed wing, the revolution will come. I don't know how plausible that is, but it's definitely not a secret that both groups are showing increasing signs of frustration.

    The best chance of peaceful evolution is the elected officials getting smart and working to restore civil liberties as written, but I am definitely not holding my breath. The priorities are too distorted.

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