5 White Collar Jobs Robots Already Have Taken 257
bizwriter writes University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimated in 2013 that 47 percent of total U.S. jobs could be automated and taken over by computers by 2033. That now includes occupations once thought safe from automation, AI, and robotics. Such positions as journalists, lawyers, doctors, marketers, and financial analysts are already being invaded by our robot overlords. From the article: "Some experts say not to worry because technology has always created new jobs while eliminating old ones, displacing but not replacing workers. But lately, as technology has become more sophisticated, the drumbeat of worry has intensified. 'What's different now?' asked Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst at market research firm Outsell. 'The pace of technology advancements plus the big data phenomenon lead to a whole new level of machines to perform higher level cognitive tasks.' Translated: the old formula of creating more demanding jobs that need advanced training may no longer hold true. The number of people needed to oversee the machines, and to create them, is limited. Where do the many whose occupations have become obsolete go?"
#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:5, Informative)
Financial and Sports Reporters
Online Marketers
Anesthesiologists, Surgeons, and Diagnosticians
E-Discovery Lawyers and Law Firm Associates
Financial Analysts and Advisors
Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, PURE click bait...
How did this get past the editors?
Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:5, Funny)
How did this get past the editors?
They've been replaced by robots already.
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replaced? when were they not robots with eliza-level AI?
Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:4, Funny)
Another place where robots might be a good replacement is at the middle management level - one of the big problem with managers is that they so often combine lack of people skills with absence of useful knowledge and inability to empathise, and introducing robots could improve on all three fronts. It certainly couldn't get worse.
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Both of you are wrong, keep it up and whatever project/task you're working on will be unpleasant, and at best limp to the finish line. Just about everyone has a manager, a professional in any field will get their manager's respect by learning and solving their manager's problems with minimal fuss. If after 12 months or so, that doesn't work, find a new job/manager. If your manager doesn't have problems it's probably because you'
Slashdotters in denial (Score:2)
First they replaced the assembly line workers. I didn't say anything because I wasn't an assembly line worker
Then they replaced the cashiers and greeters. I didn't say anything because I wasn't a cashier or greeter.
Then they replaced the teachers. I didn't say anything because I wasn't a teacher.
Then they replaced the drivers, I didn't say anything because I wasn't a driver.
Then they replaced middle management. I didn't say anything because I wasn't middle management.
Then they replaced the teachers. I
Re:Slashdotters in denial (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently the first time they didn't do a very good job of replacing the teachers...
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Hardly; even a cheap-ass robot would do a better job catching dupes than these rubes.
In any case, if the editors are robots, with whom is Bennet Haselton sleeping to get his personal maunderings hyped as news?
Ironic (Score:2)
Some experts say not to worry because technology has always created new jobs while eliminating old ones ones, displacing but not replacing workers.
The company claims it can weave that data into a compelling narrative that on a skill level an experienced writer can do
can automate delivery of low-level anesthesia in applications like colonoscopies at the fraction of the cost
I never could have predicted have the things that have come to play ten years ago
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well its obvious the tfa writer is working the job of an AI or the job of a robot.
the blurb was puzzling enough. like, what job is an AI? or robot? or they mean that robot builders now need to build robots to build robots or AI developers are being replaced by AI's? surely they're not.
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The job of the editors is to maximize profitability.
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How did this get past the editors?
Here are 7 ways to get clickbait past the editors [thoughtcatalog.com]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Sorry couldn't resist but you dog eat dog ideas of economics just beg for that response.
Employment has largely gone into minimum wage service industries because a bunch of douche wankers want to order people about, you know, all those clinical narcissists and psychopaths that everyone would normally be better of ignoring but of course psychopathic and narcissistic mainstream media has pushed out those ideas of somehow being of value in their world of selfishness, greed a
Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:5, Insightful)
Unemployment is created by government rules, laws, taxes, nothing else.
Unemployment is a function of capitalism in order to create fear and a willing pool of people prepared to do awful jobs for rubbish pay.
With no government intervention, corporations would wipe out trade unions and any form of worker protection, and pay even less than they do now, as a near-starvation wage is better than actually starving.
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People don't realize that literally all evils in the marketplace are due to initiation of aggression, and in government we have an agency that claims that it has the right and moral obligation to initiate aggression at any time and in any place. Is it really a surprise that they are at the root of the problems we have in the marketplace?
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Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:4, Insightful)
With no government intervention, corporations would wipe out trade unions and any form of worker protection, and pay even less than they do now, as a near-starvation wage is better than actually starving.
The unemployed aren't actually starving right now, and they are free to sit in the park on a sunny day. Sounds better than be kept as slaves inside a factory for 24 hours a day.
Yes, but the reason that the unemployed aren't starving is precisely because the government pays them something.
In the libertarian/free market utopia, they would be free to starve to death in the park on a sunny day.
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Actually, they would be free to sit in a sunny park selling food to passerbys, and thereby make money for themselves. In our current system, any attempts to do this without first paying off the state are met with extreme violence.
So you have hundreds of people in the park, all trying to sell food to people passing by. Where are those people passing by going? Not to a "real job" - they don't have one because the robots took them over. No, they're going to their own spot in the park to try to sell food to some other passer-by because they figured that if so many people are doing it, it must be a good way to make money. Sort of like the stampede into app development.
Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score:4, Insightful)
As more and more jobs are automated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available, and more and more people trying to get them.
Let's just look at ATM machines. They made it possible for people to get cash out at any time, so banks needed fewer tellers. Now what happens when all money goes digital - you pay for stuff using a smart card or smart phone? No more ATM machines. Which means those jobs designing and making them, and those jobs servicing them, and those armored car jobs filling them up with money, disappear.
And so do the cash registers. No more taking cash payments and giving change to anyone. Smart shopping carts bill everything in your cart as you go through the exit, so no self-serve checkouts with a supervisor for every x machines. So, no cash money, no need to print it or mint coins - those jobs are gone, as are all the jobs transporting and handling money. No more counterfeiting currency. No more need for safes to hold cash overnight in the store. No more nightly bank deposits.
We're beyond the point where automating jobs creates more opportunities. Once a robot is designed, you don't need more human labor to make 1 or a million. Those million employees at Foxconn who are going to be displaced by robots [ieee.org] won't be moving up the food chain.
Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.
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Also, you don't have to die. The world we are trying to build is one without sickness or death. Extend the lifespan of ma
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When there are no jobs, provided we can feed everyone, we essentially have communism. The worker becomes the artist and the commodity is culture.
That could happen, more likely the unemployed will be considered "useless eaters" and every effort will be made to disenfranchise them. Warehousing and/or liquidation will be the preferred outcomes by the elite.
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Can't see people buying in to a life where they get a stipend from the government to sit around and do nothing.
Isn't that the goal of most workers - to retire and collect a pension?
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Sure there is - but as we go into the jobless future, working and building up a pension won't be an option for many - and it won't matter how much education they have or how qualified they are.
Example - something as simple as baby sitting. A robot won't be inattentive, won't lose it and shake the kid when it gets fussy, won't get stoned and put the baby in the oven and the turkey in the crib ... and at a lower cost to boot.
Once people get used to the concept, they'll insist their kids be watched by bots b
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So what? That is maximal economic efficiency. You should be ashamed of yourself for flying in the face of economic theory.
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Black Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Black Mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: use the technology of money creation to fund a basic income, so people can pursue their happiness, and explore their natural creativity and wonder.
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they enjoy like create art, make an app, write a book etc
... fuck around, smoke meth, thrash the place...
Re:Black Mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't have to look beyond America's prisons to see the fallacy [weburbanist.com] in this train of thought.
Re:Black Mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
Automation changes the source of production from workers to machines. And that separates the source of production from the source of consumption.
To put it simply, robots produce wealth but does not consume it. Humans consume wealth, but (in this possible future) can no longer produce it. Robots have owners of course, but even if you ignore what happens to the majority of people, a few extremely wealthy people can not possibly make up for the consumption shortfall. Ten-thousand people with 10k each vastly outconsume (by necessity) a single person worth 100M.
So, if the entities making wealth and those using wealth become separate, you need a way to transfer wealth from one to the other. If not, you will see a slow-moving economic collapse, as lack of demand and cost-cutting automation drive each other down.
A basic income, generated from a tax on production (transaction tax, energy tax, direct tax on machinery) is one way, and has the benefit of being simple, straightforward and having low administrative overhead.
Re:Black Mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
Robots have owners of course
And the owners take everything the robots produce. People who don't own robots can just go fuck themselves. How's that ?
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Robots have owners of course
And the owners take everything the robots produce. People who don't own robots can just go fuck themselves. How's that ?
Yep, sounds like a perfect recipe for a revolution.
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You call it a revolution. The robots call it an easy extermination.
Reform IP (Score:4, Interesting)
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Do you even realise that it is not supply of money that is limiting people's wealth, it is supply of production, or do you not realise that?
But if the production is all done by robots, that only leaves things like writing music or poetry for humans to do.
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It's amazing. Mexicans who can't legally work in this country have no problem finding jobs here but many citizens do.
Try this on for size [dailymail.co.uk]
The number of Mexican immigrants living illegally in the U.S. has dropped significantly for the first time in decades, showing a dramatic shift as many illegal workers are moving back to Mexico from the U.S. because there are so few job opportunities.
The new analysis comes amid renewed debate over U.S. immigration policy as the Supreme Court hears arguments this week on Arizona's tough immigration law.
Mexican immigrants make account for nearly 60 per cent of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. and last year there were 6.1million in America. That number was down from its peak in 2007 when there were 7million confirmed in the U.S.
That drop was the biggest one in modern history, with the Pew Hispanic Center noting it was believed to only be surpassed in scale by losses in the Mexican-born U.S. population during the Great Depression
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You're way too optimistic. I see Idiocracy becoming a reality first.
Re:Black Mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet (kinda like the human batteries from The Matrix)
I tend to look to the past for what we will find in the future and this immediately brought to mind 'A Modest Proposal' with its suggestion for the proper use of 'excess human population'. Just to save you from doing any research, it is the same that was found in Soylent Green (but much better written, Johnathan Swift possessed wit)
Of course, Spock's Brain comes to mind as our robotic overlords become to advanced to be bothered with tending to the 'plumbing' and outsource the more mundane work to our feeble human brains
The expositions of the future used to envision a world where automation resulted in a life of ease for us mere humans, this could still be the case if the concentration of wealth to the upper echelons can be avoided
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Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet
Killing the humans and burning their bodies is more energy efficient.
Re:Black Mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet
Killing the humans and burning their bodies is more energy efficient.
But at some point people will notice that their friends and neighbours are being burnt. The point is that you have to pacify the majority or else they turn on those in power.
In Brave New World, the proles had drugs and sex to keep them happy: it's a much better prediction of the future than 1984 in many ways.
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The point is that you have to pacify the majority or else they turn on those in power.
I'm pretty sure a robot army could handle a bunch of civilians.
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But not as effective as killing them and turning them into a food for the workers.
Not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Financial and sports reporters - the examples are the types of stores that are full of facts and figures, and are better done by computers anyway. It's kind of like bemoaning computers taking away the human job of compiling telephone directories (remember those?). Not a lot of human touch needed there.
Online marketers - Really? Creating email subject lines? And I've stumbled onto those sites. They are only effective because they make it hard to click on anything OTHER than an ad. Not exactly stealing a desirable human job there.
E-discovery - i.e., Google for lawyers. And Wikipedia says they have 53K employees. Wait, I thought we were eliminating human jobs!
Financial advisers - good riddance. Most of them are just trying to get you to go for the investment with the highest commission, not the best for you. Computers will follow suit, but whatever.
Here's one they missed: radio DJs. You've heard these stations that are totally automated. No human touch, dry as a bone. The ones you want to listen to are still emceed by humans.
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Financial and sports reporters - the examples are the types of stores that are full of facts and figures, and are better done by computers anyway.
Let me introduce you to Red Smith and A.J. Liebling. American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith [amazon.com], A.J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings [amazon.com]
''I've always had the notion,'' Smith once said, ''that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.''
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This has been true through most of human civilization. Machines has increased the amount work that a human could do, and with power production amplified it. With electronics we code the actual human knowledge so that less skilled workers can actually approximate the output of a more skilled worker. This has been actually been since the advent of
No increase (Score:2, Insightful)
But lately, as technology has become more sophisticated, the drumbeat of worry has intensified.
It hasn't increased. Probably the high-point for this worry was the Luddites. And another high-point was in the 50s, when computers were first coming out, and movies played on that worry. When was the last movie where a job-taking-computer was the main villain?
Re:No increase (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 50s it was container shipping that caused all the fuss that made the papers.
Garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
1. High volume data reporting such as sports and fiance where people are just looking for numbers. I mean... who cares? These are things that previously were often just charts. And really, which would you rather read? A chart that gives you the numbers of some natural language engine that turns the numbers into a bogus article? Give me the chart any day. And that never took much labor.
2. Scanning emails to to do targeted advertising. How is this a job anyone got taken away from them? For one thing, if something is going to read my emails, I'd prefer it be a robot rather then a human being. And beyond that, this is a job that wouldn't even exist without robots. After all, who is going to pay someone to go through all those emails to look for key words and then match those key words to targeted advertising? Dumb.
3. I'm not terribly worried about a supped up version of WebMD. But if that system can actually do that job... then that is amazing and a blessing. Look at all the people struggling with paying for medical bills. National budgets are getting strained with the expense. And then so many communities don't have first class hospitals to get access to such people even if they can pay/they're subsidized. This technology if it works will save lives and lower medical costs which is something we sorely need. The first two things listed were bullshit and the third if viable is fucking amazing.
4. Discovery in law suits is possibly the most boring thing anyone in law can ever be assigned to do. Whenever this happens they always put the most junior interns they can get their hands on to do it. It is a bullshit job that no one wants to do and a horrible waste of a law degree. Also... this could make court costs more reasonable... which is also good.
5. The problem with human financial analysts is that they get emotional. They get scared or they get greedy or they get lazy or they drawn into some fad. What is more, they're expensive again if you want a good one and that's just out of reach of most people. AI financial assistants will have their own problems. But something is better then nothing.
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That was a ROBOT??!? (Score:2)
His business card said "Office of the Public Defender."
Re:That was a ROBOT??!? (Score:5, Funny)
He IS a defender robot. He is here to protect you. Grandma is protected at the bottom of the stairs.
Technology takes a long time to catch up. (Score:2)
I'm sure many devs have had jobs where they're working on some sort of killer automation. Something that makes them look out into a sea of office workers thinking "by end of year, we'll only need half of you..."
They're jobs that technology has long since claimed, yet they still exist. Nothing's perfect. It'll be a slow road.
The fix (Score:3)
Create automation that replaces politicians, CEOs, and economists and watch the fixes fly!
We just need a set of context sensitive executive decision makers (deluxe model uses an actual radiation source for random numbers.). They can have options like 'steal from social programs', 'tax the poor', 'Give banks a handout', 'blame the other party', etc. CEO versions can include 'give employees food stamp applications', 'layoff', 'plunder the pension fund', etc.
First role taken over (Score:3)
Google "define computer"
Answer: "[...] a person who makes calculations, especially with a calculating machine."
That role was the first to go - the others are just side-effects.
Journalism has already been crowdsourced (Score:2)
Journalism has already been crowdsourced. All you have to do is look at the number of blog postings and discussions at any website that references "news" articles (including Slashdot) to realize that.
Newspapers are already being forced into a co-operative model to apply the resources needed to do true investigative reporting, like the most recent HSBC scandal. None of them have enough staff left on the payroll to do it by themselves.
Software and IT have much the same problem, though the "crowd" is a
No More Blacksmiths, CRT Repairmen, John Henrys (Score:3)
What never fails to concern people is that 100 years ago, 80% of humans worked in agriculture and earned $5k per year, and today we are replacing jobs that pay $100K per year at X rate with technology (or imports etc.)... Can we deduce from those two facts that the future is in jeopardy? "Poverty used to be in decline, but now wealth is in decline!" That's the argumentum in terrorem or "doom and gloom" fallacy.
The people quoted in TFA are having trouble speculating what the new jobs will be. Recall the hysteria in the 1970s and 80s about the number of USA jobs moving to Japan, or the 90s-2000s jobs moving to China. 80,000 jobs doing X were lost was a constant headline over 4-5 decades. Yet my state has
If the 80,000 jobs lost to Y during X period was an accurate predictor of concern we'd have reached 90% unemployment a decade ago. Technology both replaces and creates jobs, like App Developer or 3D computer animation artist, or smartphone assembler, that no one imagined. True, most of the new jobs being created today are being created in emerging markets, but as China develops more cell phone assembly jobs, USA sells China more Buicks.
If someone with a time machine had gone back to meet me 30 years ago and shown me film of me using a cell phone to browse the internet and speak to my kid in Europe, and told me the technology cost me $30K per year, I'd have believed that. And today that "imagined value" means I'm living like a person making $29k more than I actually am.
The BLS has not been the greatest predictor of which jobs will be in demand, but has predicted employment markets in aggregate pretty well. "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted a 15% increase in the employment for all animal care and service workers between 2012 and 2022; however, employment of zookeepers was predicted to grow more slowly than other positions (www.bls.gov)." http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest... [bls.gov]
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Part of the issue here is that history provides no guide. There have been times in the past that show simularities, like the industrial revolution, but they are no more than simularities - computers is a fundamentally new technology, and so it is hard to estimate the impact of an event that has never before occured.
importantly, many of these new jobs do not scale with population. If the population doubles then you need twice as many farmers growing food, twice as many people at production lines to make thei
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As they say in the Stock Market:
Past performance is no predictor of future results.
A lot of people who thought otherwise when buying mortgage-backed securities learned that the hard way not long ago.
If you can mathematically prove that any time jobs are handed off to external forces that new jobs will spontaneously arrive to replace them, you will be awarded a Nobel Prize. No question of it.
As it is, you're simply extrapolating, and extrapolation has become extremely hazardous in the last century because of the higher rates of change in so many contributing
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which makes for higher consumption which creates more jobs
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But again, that's just extrapolation. Blind hope without even the promise of faith that things will be ever and ever the same, amen without a point where one more straw breaks the camel's back.
That's neither prudent nor human. We succeed because we ask "what if?", not because we assume.
Bill Gates can afford as much toilet paper as anyone could ever want, but how much will he buy?
Conversely, when no one has any income, what does it matter how cheap things are? That's like giving them a tax break based on a p
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They want everyone to be poor so they can control us. It is all about control. That is why their kind moves jobs out of the country. What you described is their master plan. They want us to starve.
What good does it do to control an army of poor and starving people ?
Where the economic system breaks down (Score:3)
Back in the 1960's, there was a TV show called "The 21st Century", which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. He kept going on about how much more leisure time people would have in the 21st century. What the futurists of the day forgot to consider was that if you put everyone out of a job, nobody is going to have money to spend, and thus there would be no market to sell to.
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1) Robots cannot replace all jobs. We've yet to make a self-fixing robot of any note. AI is NOWHERE NEAR capable of doing the simplest of paperwork or administration. Hell, we've barely automated anything of the IT departments, let alone anywhere else. All they can automate are mindless, repetitive, labour-intensive (and sometimes dangerous) jobs. Though that puts a LOT of people out of work, that's by far not the majority.
2) If robots do replace all jobs, the "money" comes from sale of goods just the
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The result of the above is that food and goods become so cheap and plentiful
At least you'll need a source of free and unlimited energy for that.
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Automation can't replace all jobs, but from what I've read there are a couple of concerns.
A lot of the jobs that seem to be most easily automatable are "good" white collar jobs that previously had required some skill. There's a lot less manufacturing left (partly due to automation, but partly due to offshoring of manufacturing), so there's a lot less fallback jobs outside of very low wage service jobs.
Even if the job loss ends up being only 20%, 20% unemployment is a big deal. It can have higher-order eco
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2) If robots do replace all jobs, the "money" comes from sale of goods just the same. Half the workforce are working and doing the work of the other half - the robots produce the goods / services, and the humans lounge at home.
And just who is going to give money to the humans lounging at home with which they will pay for housing, food, clothing, transportation, goods and services? How much money will they be given? Or is this "home" you speak of just going to be a tent in Hooverville?
3) The result of the above is that food and goods become so cheap and plentiful that the concept of "buying" them will seem old hat.
The economic system is one where all goods and services have to be paid for at some level. Even subsidized services like public transportation and health care require some level of payment. Are you suggesting that the long-term unemployed will
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Metalicarap will be the equaliser (Score:2)
The Australia Project (Score:2)
FTW
This just in.. (Score:2)
What's Different Now (Score:2)
Nothing new here... (Score:2)
Even if you accept that new jobs will be created.. (Score:2)
Even if you accept the premise that new jobs will be created by the new technologies, there are still risks.
1) The new more-demanding jobs will be beyond the intelligence and abilities of a larger and larger portion of the population. What happens when the computers and robots are smarter than the average bear/human?
2) Even if a person is capable of performing one of these more-demanding jobs, the new jobs will demand that they spend more and more years in training and learning. Without a significant incre
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I suppose another alternative is a massive depopulation of the human species on earth. That can easily be accomplished if the struggle for wealth distribution devolves into war.
At least war is something that humans with few weapons/resources afforded to them are much more effective at than self replicating robot armies decked out with the latest military hardware.
They need to replace executives... (Score:2)
Robots can do the most worthless employees jobs far more efficiently and save corporations a lot more money.
Start with the executives. Hell roombas can make better decisions than these guys.
Where do the many go? (Score:2)
not being replaced just being changed. (Score:2)
These white collar jobs aren't being replaced any more than the spreadsheet and accounting software replaced the accountant.
There is still a human at the top. A computer can't completely replace a lawyer and won't be able to for a very long time.
This is just FUD. There are jobs that are at risk and just like what has happened with farmers, ditch diggers, and accountants
one person can now handle the work of 10 (or 100) people but as long as the pace is reasonable and there is still a need for
a percentage of
"...invaded by our robot overlords." (Score:2)
Did you say "overlords"? You meant "protectors": https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
technology has always destroyed jobs (Score:3)
Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA. This review sums it up nicely [amazon.com]
The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.
Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.
If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided [ucsc.edu]
I've got less work to do. But I'm more important. (Score:2)
What I'm observing right now is that I, as a computer expert, have less work to do because most of the programming for what I did the last 15 years is done already and available for free. Example from a related field: Good fonts would cost a few hundred bucks 10 years ago. Now they are available for free with MS, Google and Co. constantly shelling out new ones. We all know what usefull server setups or IDEs used to cost and how easyly they are available for free, in abundance.
Curiously enough, I do get the
The Big Picture (Score:2)
Right now the talk is about, "they will move the jobs to Indonesia or Africa", etc; How would the CCP deal with Billions of unemployed? How would the US govt?
The problem starts when large groups of people lose their jobs to automation and robots.
What would happen to those employed in the Ag industries if tech showed up that could pick and process produce much quicke
Re: (Score:3)
There are huge problems in the world that desperately need solving. But most of the people who need those problems solved are too poor to pay for a solution. And most of the solutions depend on a major increase in knowledge (e.g. scientific research) which is very cumbersome to fund via a free market.
There's a huge class of huge problems that have known solutions, but neither the will or competence to implement them. It's also not a matter of wealth since developed world societies have nailed down a lot of problems despite starting at deeper levels of poverty.
it's not clear that's any better than just having the government fund the work directly.
Sure, it is. Government is absolutely shit at figuring out what is good research. One thing we need to remember here is that there used to be a huge, privately funded science powerhouse in the developed world. That got scrapped because it was easie
Re: (Score:2)
If there is money to let ISIS exists, there is money to let them live without being terrorist.
Do you really think we could afford WWI or WWII ? This doesn't mean they didn't happen. War is the number one justification for spending money countries don't have.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't get it. If any of these new jobs are repetitive and require little creativity, a cheap robot can replace the human worker.
The probl
Re:What's different now?... (Score:4, Insightful)
When the buggy whip makers went out of business, the car industry was already in full swing. They were already outputting enough cars to replace the buggies. The buggy whip makers could actually see the workers working to make them obsolete. At this time, it was wellknown how many jobs the automobile industry was creating. And it was wellknown that the new automobile not only replaced the horse carriage, it actually made it better, allowing for more trips, for more load hauled, for higher speed. The car helped to make the whole transportation business to grow more productive, and not just a few percent, it was a multitude of improvement. The demand for transportation at the same time was also growing because transportation got so much cheaper that goods or persons which would never have been transported so far and so often before, now could. Replacing the buggy with the car as the means of transport actually increased the transporting market.
Buggy whip makers didn't need to imagine the new jobs. They knew what the new jobs were, as they could see their neigbours already having them.
But if you just replace a worker by a machine, there is not necessarily a new job opening waiting. The manufacturer of the machine already has the people to make the machine, as he was able to built it. And it's not as if his business has to be growing, as the market for his worker-replacement-machines is limited to the number of workers his machines can replace. It happens that not only the worker who is replaced by the machine is out of the job, also the people installing the machine are also out of a job, because their job is now finished. And maintaining the machine surely will require either less man-power or less qualified man-power than the man-power it is replacing. Otherwise there would be no point in actually replacing them.
Automatisation of jobs in general does not create new jobs. It just frees up human labor. If that allows for huge gains in productivity (and we are talking huge gains. The mechanical loom improved the productivity tenfold, and so did the spinning machine), there might be new markets and thus there might be new demand, creating new jobs. But just replacing the human by a machine does not. Having cheaper sport news does not increase the market for sport news. The replacement of the financial advisor by a computer does not increase the demand for financial advise, because the requestor does not get a tenfold improvement on his ROI. As a maximum, he saves the few percents the human financial advisor got as his premium. The same is valid for legal expertise. People will not want to have more need for legal advise just because it is cheaper. Most people prefer not to be involved in legal quagmires at all. Compare that with the demand for cars! People love to buy cars. Or at least, they used to love it. But the demand for new cars is already shrinking at least in some parts of the world. Young people in Europe list the desire to own a car quite low in their priorities already. A similar trend can be seen in the U.S.. And which new job is replacing the car manufacturer's job? Simply none. Completely different than it was when the welder's job at a car factory replaced the buggy whip maker.