Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
The issue is machine are moving up the spectrum from unskilled labor to skilled labor. Yes, picking rock and baling hay are chump jobs but think of where things are going.
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS an
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS and other advances, combined with the realization that the bulk of reported incidents are the result of human error, I can see even that job disappearing in a couple decades.
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS and other advances, combined with the realization that the bulk of reported incidents are the result of human error, I can see even that job disappearing in a couple decades.
Our regards to captain dunsel.
I think it's time for a TOS marathon, took a few seconds to twig
Nit pick: You've actually got that backwards. The airline pilot's job is actually easier. So much so that most of the flying is automated already, and except for gusty days, the automation can make a better landing than most pilots.
Flying requires paying strict attention to keeping the airplane within narrow parameters. Something people are generally bad at (we all have a bit of adhd in us), but computers excel. Stick the numbers, and you will grease the landing. Driving a taxi is an exercise in deali
There's a never-ending stream of people predicting airliners will be automated, but not one who will volunteer to be the first passenger on a fully-automated airliner.
The pilot isn't there only to land the aircraft. They're there to make (sometimes tough) decisions.
It has been proven in the simulator that if Sully and Styles had turned immediately back to the airport upon loss of engine power, they could have landed downwind on the runway they departed from. Maybe the automation program would have known tha
I would be fine with them replacing lawyers with...nothing. If we got rid of sue-happy people and the lawyers that spur them on, then everything would cost half what it does.
My wife keeps talking about wanting to have a human to listen, understand, and care. I'm more interested to fixing what's broken. If RoboDoc can fix it better then the person, give me RoboDoc. If neither can, then I want to talk to a person, but not one who's being paid to listen.
if patients all gave proper responses or felt symptoms the same way, robodoc would make sense. Human doctors are needed because the input for the diagnosis process is very messy and needs a little finesse.
The only reason it will go as slow as it does is the comfort level of older people. They'll have to die off, but as their kids grow up with RoboDoc, things will rapidly change.
And where will the money come from to pay for the RoboDocs if there are no jobs available to those kids?
Although there is always more work to do, that doesn't mean there's always people who want to do it. Interestingly enough, I think part of the reason for advancement in technology (on farms) was not only for greater profit, but also to replace the hard to find work. Sure, "anyone" could work the farm, but that doesn't mean they were any good at it OR they wanted to do it. Having read books about migrant workers, they were very poorly treated and extremely underpaid - both because they were "undocumented wor
Now adays you can't get "documented" workers to break their backs on farms
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you were willing to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you could afford to to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
The ones who would do it are forced out of business by those that don't, unless there's real enforcement of laws mandating it.
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
As a farm owner, I have to respectfully disagree. Check out the H2-A program. Though many labor contractors choose to not use this program, when they do, one requirement is to advertise the job to US citizens first. Typically, they can fill about 10% of the applications, and then a small fraction of those will actually complete the job.
Good wages and benefits don't alleviate the work involved with many farm labor jobs (try picking avocados commercially, or hand weeding a field for a day sometime). For be
How much do you want your food to cost? Already, farmers are paying $10.48/hr for seasonal workers under the H-2a program.
It's naive to think that you can pay every single person a living wage for every single job. In fact, it's considerably worse than naive, you either do not have a firm grip on reality, or you know nothing what so ever about economics.
That's more than twice what I made at my first job when I was 16. You'd think teenagers (hey, why do we have a break in the middle of the school yea
It's naive to think that you can pay every single person a living wage for every single job. In fact, it's considerably worse than naive, you either do not have a firm grip on reality, or you know nothing what so ever about economics.
Uh, it's you who don't have any grasp of economics.
Americans, even last year in a recession, made $12,357,113,000,000 in personal income. That's $42,000 a person, assuming it's spread over 300,000,000 people. (I don't know why we're paying a bunch of children, but let's jus
Exactly. It's not automation that's the problem, it's competition! Food has to be cheap, or else it will be imported from countries where people are willing to work in deplorable conditions. Same thing with manufacturing. Our labour is expensive, while or goods have to be cheap.
Personally I don't think it'd hurt us too much if our food got slightly more expensive. A fine example of this is milk in Netherland. Many cattle farmers can hardly make a decent living while working insane hours. Of the price we pay
Because combines are specialized machines that can only replace one category of work and at a fairly high cost.
Robots are generalized machines which are cheap ($15k per year to lease and can "work" 2.5 shifts per day with 99% uptime- no benefits, no sick time- no vacation time- no lawsuits).
Any expensive thinking job can be offshored now. Any "no brainer" work can be done by a machine. A large number of medium skill jobs have been turned into applicaitons like Microsoft Office. Recepitionists have been replace
But efficiently automated processes are NOT general. A well-programmed robot can do one specifically delineated task (and a series of robots can perform a complex but repeated automated task, like microchip manufacture) much better than a human ever could. But a human can do many different tasks reasonably well. As it stands, there is no robot that can do the same thing. In the future, there may be, but we're pretty damn far from that stage right now.
My estimate for the existence of robots with minds as capable as humans is around 2030. It's been there for around 20 years, so the estimate seems pretty stable. What's not clear is that society will be able to hold together under the increasingly unjust conditions until then. Or what will happen then,
The obvious solution is to make conditions less unjust. Unfortunately, most people want to freeze the world so that it looks the way it did when they were 12...or younger. And the way the world looks to a
In what fantasy world do you live in? Because it isn't Earth. Here, we don't have robots that can do even a fraction of what a man can do. We certainly don't have any that are reliable at doing that fraction.
You say any "no brainer" job can be done by a robot. Explain why Tacobell employes 50 people per store (average)? Can't a robot make a taco? Or did you just forget to mention economies of scale and their MASSIVE importance in these discussions? You say "a large number of medium skill jobs have b
Going to have to call long distance to get to your world.
Receptionists... many major companies no longer have a human answer the phone. You call- you get a machine that guides you to a series of scripted response and hopefully to a human. Calling an employee at the company? The machine prompts you for the employee name or extension. No human receptionist. Not for a decade.
Typing... they *used* to have these things called secretaries or typing pools. Now- that job is on our desk.
I for one support automation of everything that can be automated, but to play devil's advocate, agricultural automation has ruined that sector as a source of jobs. In case you hadn't noticed, economies everywhere used to be agrarian first, urban second. The agriculture industry can no longer support so large a percentage of the population financially, and what's left is more efficient as a conglomerate than a family operation. Both of which are as likely as not to hire people below minimum wage where more p
First agriculture, then manufacturing, then services.
In 1900, agriculture employed 55% of the civilian labor force. Now, about 2%, depending how you count seasonal labor. In 1970 manufacturing was about 35% (IIRC) of US employment. Now, 14% and falling. In 2011, services employ over 70% of the labor force. In 2041,..?
In services the big occupation is "cashier", with "retail supervisor" next (again, IIRC. Check the Bureau of Labor Statistics website if interested.) A comment up-thread talked about bus- and
Absolutely. More efficiency is always good. If the benefits of that increased efficiency are not distributed equally, that's a problem with the economic system, not the automation.
When machines are so effective that only 10% of the population must work in order for 100% to have its needs met, what economic system do you use to distribute the products?
Realize that in order for any kind of labor-reducing machine to be economically viable its total cost of ownership must be less than the money it saves by eliminating human labor. So the existence of machines creates jobs (production, maintenance, etc...) but the total money that flows into those jobs is *and must be* less than the mone
A base-level income and solid standard of living should be given to all, but those with the ambition, skillset and drive to do work for the good of society should be rewarded for doing so by earning larger incomes and thus being able to sustain an improved standard of living.
That way, everyone is guaranteed a reasonable standard of living, but exceptional people can still aspire to rise above.
But it won't happen as long as the stodgy old conservatives continue to use "socialism" and "communism" as great big
You could also think of industrial machines like agricultural slaves in US history. Push down the wages of the free workers, enrich the large plantation holders, impoverish many more people who can't compete with what is essentially extraordinarily cheap labor.
You could also think of industrial machines like agricultural slaves in US history.
Push down the wages of the free workers, enrich the large plantation holders, impoverish many more people who can't compete with what is essentially extraordinarily cheap labor.
Sure, you could think that way. But why would you? It hasn't been true in practice.
It hasn't? Take a look around. We're in an era where workers are extraordinarily productive, yet average wages keep falling, and the wealth of the ownership class has increased massively.
We're in an era where workers are extraordinarily productive, yet average wages keep falling, and the wealth of the ownership class has increased massively.
Easily explained by the globalization of labor. It's not that human workers are competing with machines, but that human workers are competing with cheaper human workers. Of course, you'd expect both that the price of labor in the most expensive parts of the world would decline and that owners, whose property doesn't decline in value, wouldn't suffer declines in their wealth.
It's not that human workers are competing with machines, but that human workers are competing with cheaper human workers.
I'd say it's both. As far as a business is concerned, they don't really care how a job gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible for an acceptable level of quality. If that can be done with a machine, they'll do it with a machine. If that means outsourcing to a cheaper labor pool, they will outsource.
I'd say it's both. As far as a business is concerned, they don't really care how a job gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible for an acceptable level of quality. If that can be done with a machine, they'll do it with a machine. If that means outsourcing to a cheaper labor pool, they will outsource.
Of course both are going on. But the industrial age started more than a century ago and human worker wages have increased considerably since then. When developed world labor was exposed to cheap developing world labor, then the value of that labor started to decline.
Sure, you could think that way. But why would you? It hasn't been true in practice.
The last few decades (in the US, at least) has seen stagnant real incomes for all but the top few percent (the "large plantation holders").
Or, in other words, effectively all the productivity, efficiency and wealth gains resulting from the last few decades of technology and innovation, have gone nearly entirely into the pockets of a handful of people, at the cost of everyone else.
The last few decades (in the US, at least) has seen stagnant real incomes for all but the top few percent (the "large plantation holders").
Or, in other words, effectively all the productivity, efficiency and wealth gains resulting from the last few decades of technology and innovation, have gone nearly entirely into the pockets of a handful of people, at the cost of everyone else.
No it hasn't. What has happened is that the global labor pool has more than doubled in size over the past few decades due to globalization. And the developed world hasn't tried particularly hard to make its workers valuable relative to the new labor markets which have opened up.
You ignore the workers in the developing world. They're doing quite well.
How can they when "valuable" is a synonym for "cheap" ?
They can start by making their workers cheaper to employ by a) reducing the cost of employing people (for example, reducing or eliminating employer-side payments for public pensions, health care, etc), b) reducing the cost of complying with regulation (both by streamlining compliance paperwork and cutting regulation that doesn't meet a reasonable cost/benefit threshold), c) cut overall government spending and reduce tax burden on the w
You ignore the workers in the developing world. They're doing quite well.
Not really. Better than they were, certainly. But the wealth distribution in most of those countries is even worse than it is in the developed world.
They can start by making their workers cheaper to employ by a) reducing the cost of employing people (for example, reducing or eliminating employer-side payments for public pensions, health care, etc), b) reducing the cost of complying with regulation (both by streamlining compliance pap
So, throw away nearly all the quality of life benefits gained from decades of productivity and technology and race to the bottom ? What a great idea !
I suppose we can just not employ developed world workers instead and lose those quality of life benefits in some other way. The race to the bottom is already happening. Better I think, to make prudent sacrifices now than have the entire system collapse later.
I suppose we can just not employ developed world workers instead and lose those quality of life benefits in some other way. The race to the bottom is already happening. Better I think, to make prudent sacrifices now than have the entire system collapse later.
Or we could, you know, aim for a more equitable distribution of wealth so that everyone can live a good life, rather than a handful living an unbelievably luxurious one and the rest a subsistence one.
Or we could, you know, aim for a more equitable distribution of wealth so that everyone can live a good life, rather than a handful living an unbelievably luxurious one and the rest a subsistence one.
What has our developed world societies done to deserve that "more equitable" distribution of wealth? My view is that the very people who are now demanding an "equitable distribution" are the same people who created the current distribution of wealth and endorsed the current failures of the system.
The wealthiest have an inherent advantage in dealing with burdensome regulation. And those trinkets which you call "quality of life benefits" are the public's bribes for going along with various scams. Well, in
What has our developed world societies done to deserve that "more equitable" distribution of wealth?
Created most of it.
My view is that the very people who are now demanding an "equitable distribution" are the same people who created the current distribution of wealth and endorsed the current failures of the system.
The top 0.1% are demanding a more equitable distribution ?
The wealthiest have an inherent advantage in dealing with burdensome regulation. And those trinkets which you call "quality of life benef
Publicly funded education, healthcare and social safety nets, health and safety regulations, worker's rights, clean water, sanitation, etc, are not "trinkets".
It's interesting how you equate clean water and sanitation with workers' rights, health care, and social safety nets. The difference is that the former two are essential parts of a society while the latter, if the price is pretty low, are merely nice to have (except maybe the euphemistically named "workers' rights"). Some places do sensible publicly funded education and health and safety regulations, but too often that stuff is abused.
And how can this stuff be "abused"? Rent seeking and fraud. Workers' r
Maybe, to keep in tune with the article, we should let machines run regulations. A machine can't take bribes.
There's a certain sense to that. But the machine and/or regulation should have a sunset provision in it. I'm leery of regulations that might last to the heat death of the universe.
It's interesting how you equate clean water and sanitation with workers' rights, health care, and social safety nets. The difference is that the former two are essential parts of a society while the latter, if the price is pretty low, are merely nice to have (except maybe the euphemistically named "workers' rights").
Firstly, I didn't claim they were all equivalent. Merely that they were significant factors in the quality of life advantages of the developed world over the developing world.
"Social safety nets" provide a lot of business for the businesses and such that end up processing the funds or providing relevant services. And there's the government agencies that gain power as the result of enforcing the regulation or restricting access to the public good in question. Fraud also is a typical outcome since it is politically lethal to fail to provide an offered service, but not politically lethal to provide that service in error.
And naturally this sort of thing is completely unheard of in private industry.
I disagree. We have a variety of means for making investments in stocks, bonds, and other things. There are plenty of companies willing to expedite that or manage your investments.
The real shame is that these bribes not only don't keep standards of living from declining, but they actively contribute to making the problem worse.
I guess that's why all the places with the highest living standards in the world are Libertarian strongholds without any of that pesky regulation, those fraud-ridden public services, and the productivity-destroying, extortionist unions. o.O
There are no Libertarian strongholds (they require a very proactive citizenry, which distinguishes them from mere anarchies) and I grant that maybe they can't exist or require infrastructure that wouldn't be maintained by the Libertarian society. But it's worth noting that all of the wealthiest societies with a few exceptions like
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job.... I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
Are we in the same boat? I think so.
I could summarize my (our?) experience as "for almost a decade and a half, at a couple places, I've used open source "stuff" to develop very closed source non-distributed complete vertical market systems for internal use only"
The real money is in complete systems development not software development. Can I personally make money writing yet another SNMP trap catcher or yet another relational database? Not really. Can I personally make money by putting the two together,
I think you're begging the question. Even if there was always more work to do in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean there will be in the future. However I don't even agree with that assumption.
Your grandparents were farmers and you are not, but that doesn't mean that machines destroying farming as a job leads to "more work." It just means that you found work elsewhere; somebody else very well may have not. You "took" somebody else's job, the machines didn't magically create it for you out of the rubble of the jobs they replaced.
I do agree with you partially: There is always work to be done, but not necessarily more work. Short of some extremely advanced and downright scary AI, there will always be jobs in this hypothetical world for programming the robots, and always work for mechanics repairing the robots. There will always be work to do in research. There will always be some degree of a service sector -- especially once we decide that those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job. But all these things will shrink. They will not support hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and even if they magically could not everybody is suited for these jobs.
And that's assuming most of the jobs left actually stay in the country, which there is little reason to believe that they will for areas like software.
There will always be work, but there won't always be enough work, and our system of values and economy will have to change in ways I can't even fathom the workings of.
He is no longer a dirt farmer, he is most likely doing an activity humans were not doing before or doing much less of before. Before the industrial revolution most people spent most of their time working in agriculture. Some people were producing metal works, constructing buildings, practicing law, manufacturing soft beds, elegant woven patterns in cloth of many colors, etc, and nobody was writing software.
Along comes the industrial revolution and all its labor saving devices. Suddenly you and I can affo
I have no idea which post to begin with, but how about here for a start. The reactionary claim that technology (or outsourcing) destroys more jobs than it creates is categorically false. On the consumption side, given a middle-class which can actually consume what it produces, say that item A undergoes outsourcing/automation/efficiency optimization. Thus A becomes cheaper due to competition. The consumer can now afford A and B for the former cost of the pre-optimized item A. The producer spends less labor t
Frankly I think, in the future, the "repairing robots" jobs will be similar to the "repairing washing machines" jobs of today -- not worth the time of the people who own them, and only performed by scrap scavengers on a less-than-economical basis.
If there's not going to be "enough" work to support everybody on a full-time basis but there's enough productivity to supply everyone's needs, why keep people working? This whole notion of a "job threat" is absolute bullshit. What happened to the days when automation would create a utopia of ease and leisure, eh?
In the past, automation has nearly always opened up new opportunities. However, there is no mathematical equation that says that will always continue. Whether we reached the "end" or not is hard to tell, almost like trying to figure out if you are in an economic bubble before it pops. Machines are getting smarter, but humans are not. Is there a point where machine smarts ruin the usual trend?
I just want to say that make-work labor ("those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job") is one of the worst ideas ever.
Work (as opposed to productive play) is a degrading part of human life. With the exception of a few people who love their jobs (and are thus spending their days playing), the time a person spends working drains from the precious little time they have on this Earth. Work has always been an awful necessity in the past, something that had to get done or else things wou
My goodness, extra kudos for proper use of "begging the question". But I have to disagree, at least with this example. It sounds like he is a programmer, so his job was literally genesised from the void. That job simply didn't exist in his parents' and grandparents' time. While it could be possible that at one day there's nothing left that needs doing for us meatbags to do, I'm pretty sure we'll find way to fill the void. Let's say with art, or politics, or research. I imagine we'd move entirely to a servic
"I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards)."
Plenty of us can do those things. We share our insights via the internet instead of by mimeographed newsletters. If we are "thrust backwards" the knowledge will survive and propagate. We have hundreds of years of technology to choose from.
Self and wife raise chickens, who are healthier because of what we learned on the internet even though we have plenty of farmer friends we also ask for info. We obtain parts for our 1937 Chevrolet truck (and our other trucks and motorcycles) via Ebay. I use Purox oxy-acetylene torches which are essentially unchanged since the 1930s. I learned about them via the internet, and can have most any part I wish in-hand in a few days.
Modern technology offers many ways to learn about less-modern technology. Being "thrust backward" is unlikely, but modern information tech makes learning about the spectrum of useful tech much easier.
I grew up before computers were commonplace. If anyone tells you those were "the good old days", punch them in the throat with my compliments.
"Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better."
Of course. Open Source means you aren't locked out like some sharecropper from land he'll never control.
Open source, whether in software, music, literature, or knowledge, prevents rent-seeking. The fight will always be between those who want to create/work once and continue to reap the benefits repeatedly vs those who profit for unit of time/energy expended.
I think you're not acknowledging the GPs legitimate point. There is a great deal of technology that is at risk of being lost. It's not the 1930s kind, it's more like the 1750s kind. Look at what came out of the toaster project [thomasthwaites.com]. Very simple things, like smelting ore, proved to be nearly impossible for him to discover. He couldn't find it on the internet.
Additionally, the GP is not talking about a world where things are pretty much as now, but somehow technology retreats. He's clearly suggesting a scenario wh
"but to claim that you, or just about anyone else, is prepared because you're handy in a few or even a few dozen ways is hubris."
Humans are TEAM players. You won't have to do it all yourself unless you are ALONE and then all you need do find water and kill for food.
The farmers would be supported by artisans (many farmers are "techies" themselves) and breeding draft animals is old news. There are plenty of mules happy to make more mules, and plenty of folks still producing tack. These technologies aren't dea
If you think of "work" and "spending time to transform something into a more valuable form" then "yes".
I think that instead of changing trees and rock into building materials the future will be more geared towards changing humans into more advanced humans.
Figuring out what the appropriate wage should be to transform a couch potato into an athlete is debatable. Figuring out what the appropriate wage for transforming a computer scientist into an astronautical engineer or a graphical artist is further debat
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States?
Dude, I hate to break this to you, but combines and tractors DID ruin agriculture jobs in the United States. Time was that a majority of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Now we're down to about 1% of the workforce.
And sure, in the past, all those displaced ag workers found other work, including doing things like building the tractors and combines. But if we get to the point (as suggested by TFA) where suddenly, large swathes of the workforce are being replaced all at once by robots... what then? The robots build themselves (not entirely, obviously, but without a lot of human labor required), so there's no help there.
There will always be more work to be done
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
The answer is so trivially simple it's laughable, except, well except that once you know the answer, it's like taking the red pill, and looking at the tubes in everyone's back, including your own, is not so much fun. (In this matrix you don't get to tear them out.)
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
The only sane thing to do then is to abolish money.
There's always more work to do, until they build HedonismBot. That will finally be a sign that something has gone too far. Until then, the robots are just helping us all to become HedonismMeatbags.
I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
Assuming the means of chicken-rearing or plant cultivation have not been done away with (thanks Monsanto for your terminator genes!), people will re-learn the skills needed to survive.
Combines may have made it possible to increase an individual farmer's output, but at what cost? Haven't we all experienced the replacement of the quality, handcrafted item with the cheap plastic mass produced part planned to break in x years (or months)? Sure that's acceptable for some things, but with our food?
Food security is enabling, empowering. And if you're considering it back-breaking, or doing so much of the same task as to need machines, or to consider the work boring, you're doing it wrong. We
You're almost right - in fact I agree with your whole post, except for one wrinkle: the 'work' to be done isn't really work at all. It's just creative time-wasting.
A long time ago, we passed the point where it actually took a reasonable chunk of work on the part of every person on Earth to keep all the people on Earth alive, fed, basically clothed and housed.
Ever since then, we've been playing increasingly elaborate shell games in which we introduce a new field of
the good news is that the socio-political-economic system by which we achieve this is a pretty robustly designed one, and there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why it won't allow us to keep coming up with ever more ridiculous uses of our time indefinitely, as we continue to automate the things we previously had to do ourselves.
the only bad news, i suppose, is that the ridiculous uses of our time which we invent seem to wind up being resource- and space-intensive as well as labor- and time-intensiv
While your argument has merit when reviewing the 19th and 20th centuries, it is missing a key point. The entire goal of mechanizing and automating work is to eliminate the need for human labor.
The only reason to have a human do a job is because either we can't make a machine do it, or we don't want to. And in the long run, the people paying for the work will choose whichever is the most cost effective.
So I find the argument that there will always be more work to be done is questionable. Maybe there will
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, in 1900 41% of the country was working agriculture.
Now it's 2%. So I would say that Combines and tractors *did* ruin agricultural jobs. Luckily for all of those farm hands though we had other unskilled labor to choose from.
This time the machines aren't just coming for the uneducated... it's coming for the middle class.
I applaud your comments, as they truly speak truth about what we should be viewing this situation as, just a means to create different jobs then the ones we have now.... in a few years from now, when robots are flipping burgers, we will be designing ships to go into space that far exceed the ones we have now....we will need to roganize and test and this is where the new job market will be,.....the future always brings new technologies and also new jobs for those technologies....just look at how many people
What is usually left out in this discussion is that there must exist a new sector for displaced workers to go, and that sector must be one those same workers can contribute to.
Assume for a moment, that none of a displaced workers skills are transferable except the most fundamental (literacy, public speaking, physical stamina). When a worker leaves agriculture, they have to find another job. If a manufacturing job screwing pieces together is available, a farm hand can probably transition to that job in only
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
There is Always More Work to Do (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue is machine are moving up the spectrum from unskilled labor to skilled labor. Yes, picking rock and baling hay are chump jobs but think of where things are going.
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS an
Re: (Score:2)
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS and other advances, combined with the realization that the bulk of reported incidents are the result of human error, I can see even that job disappearing in a couple decades.
Our regards to captain dunsel.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS and other advances, combined with the realization that the bulk of reported incidents are the result of human error, I can see even that job disappearing in a couple decades.
Our regards to captain dunsel.
I think it's time for a TOS marathon, took a few seconds to twig
Re: (Score:2)
Nit pick: You've actually got that backwards. The airline pilot's job is actually easier. So much so that most of the flying is automated already, and except for gusty days, the automation can make a better landing than most pilots.
Flying requires paying strict attention to keeping the airplane within narrow parameters. Something people are generally bad at (we all have a bit of adhd in us), but computers excel. Stick the numbers, and you will grease the landing. Driving a taxi is an exercise in deali
Re: (Score:2)
There's a never-ending stream of people predicting airliners will be automated, but not one who will volunteer to be the first passenger on a fully-automated airliner.
The pilot isn't there only to land the aircraft. They're there to make (sometimes tough) decisions.
It has been proven in the simulator that if Sully and Styles had turned immediately back to the airport upon loss of engine power, they could have landed downwind on the runway they departed from. Maybe the automation program would have known tha
Re: (Score:2)
And also....as far as automation replacing lawyers....Legal Zoom dot com.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
How about replacing Politicians, we just vote for the best algorithm? End of corruption.
Re: (Score:2)
What if the best algorithm is to take the biggest bribe and proceed as normal?
The real problem is you haven't defined a fitness test for your 'algorithmic politician'.
Which is better then the real world, where the fitness test appears to be 'tells me what I want to hear'.
Re: (Score:2)
My wife keeps talking about wanting to have a human to listen, understand, and care. I'm more interested to fixing what's broken. If RoboDoc can fix it better then the person, give me RoboDoc. If neither can, then I want to talk to a person, but not one who's being paid to listen.
if patients all gave proper responses or felt symptoms the same way, robodoc would make sense. Human doctors are needed because the input for the diagnosis process is very messy and needs a little finesse.
Re: (Score:2)
On the topic of lawyers: http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/04/lawyers-object-as-computer-program-does-job-better/ [singularityhub.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason it will go as slow as it does is the comfort level of older people. They'll have to die off, but as their kids grow up with RoboDoc, things will rapidly change.
And where will the money come from to pay for the RoboDocs if there are no jobs available to those kids?
Re: (Score:2)
Although there is always more work to do, that doesn't mean there's always people who want to do it. Interestingly enough, I think part of the reason for advancement in technology (on farms) was not only for greater profit, but also to replace the hard to find work. Sure, "anyone" could work the farm, but that doesn't mean they were any good at it OR they wanted to do it. Having read books about migrant workers, they were very poorly treated and extremely underpaid - both because they were "undocumented wor
Geez, I wonder why? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you were willing to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
But, who are you going to get to buy your $5 tomatoes?
Re: (Score:2)
I guarantee you that you could find people to do the work if you could afford to to pay a decent wage, didn't expose them to pesticides, provided retirement and medical, etc.
The ones who would do it are forced out of business by those that don't, unless there's real enforcement of laws mandating it.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean, nowadays you can't get documented workers to break their back on farms, under deplorable working conditions, for a tiny paycheck and no benefits. FTFY.
As a farm owner, I have to respectfully disagree. Check out the H2-A program. Though many labor contractors choose to not use this program, when they do, one requirement is to advertise the job to US citizens first. Typically, they can fill about 10% of the applications, and then a small fraction of those will actually complete the job.
Good wages and benefits don't alleviate the work involved with many farm labor jobs (try picking avocados commercially, or hand weeding a field for a day sometime). For be
Re: (Score:2)
It's naive to think that you can pay every single person a living wage for every single job. In fact, it's considerably worse than naive, you either do not have a firm grip on reality, or you know nothing what so ever about economics.
That's more than twice what I made at my first job when I was 16. You'd think teenagers (hey, why do we have a break in the middle of the school yea
Re: (Score:3)
It's naive to think that you can pay every single person a living wage for every single job. In fact, it's considerably worse than naive, you either do not have a firm grip on reality, or you know nothing what so ever about economics.
Uh, it's you who don't have any grasp of economics.
Americans, even last year in a recession, made $12,357,113,000,000 in personal income. That's $42,000 a person, assuming it's spread over 300,000,000 people. (I don't know why we're paying a bunch of children, but let's jus
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. It's not automation that's the problem, it's competition! Food has to be cheap, or else it will be imported from countries where people are willing to work in deplorable conditions. Same thing with manufacturing. Our labour is expensive, while or goods have to be cheap.
Personally I don't think it'd hurt us too much if our food got slightly more expensive. A fine example of this is milk in Netherland. Many cattle farmers can hardly make a decent living while working insane hours. Of the price we pay
Re: (Score:2)
Because combines are specialized machines that can only replace one category of work and at a fairly high cost.
Robots are generalized machines which are cheap ($15k per year to lease and can "work" 2.5 shifts per day with 99% uptime- no benefits, no sick time- no vacation time- no lawsuits).
Any expensive thinking job can be offshored now.
Any "no brainer" work can be done by a machine.
A large number of medium skill jobs have been turned into applicaitons like Microsoft Office.
Recepitionists have been replace
Re: (Score:2)
Robots are generalized machines
But efficiently automated processes are NOT general. A well-programmed robot can do one specifically delineated task (and a series of robots can perform a complex but repeated automated task, like microchip manufacture) much better than a human ever could. But a human can do many different tasks reasonably well. As it stands, there is no robot that can do the same thing. In the future, there may be, but we're pretty damn far from that stage right now.
Re: (Score:2)
My estimate for the existence of robots with minds as capable as humans is around 2030. It's been there for around 20 years, so the estimate seems pretty stable. What's not clear is that society will be able to hold together under the increasingly unjust conditions until then. Or what will happen then,
The obvious solution is to make conditions less unjust. Unfortunately, most people want to freeze the world so that it looks the way it did when they were 12...or younger. And the way the world looks to a
Re: (Score:2)
You say any "no brainer" job can be done by a robot. Explain why Tacobell employes 50 people per store (average)? Can't a robot make a taco? Or did you just forget to mention economies of scale and their MASSIVE importance in these discussions? You say "a large number of medium skill jobs have b
Re: (Score:2)
Going to have to call long distance to get to your world.
Receptionists... many major companies no longer have a human answer the phone. You call- you get a machine that guides you to a series of scripted response and hopefully to a human. Calling an employee at the company? The machine prompts you for the employee name or extension. No human receptionist. Not for a decade.
Typing... they *used* to have these things called secretaries or typing pools. Now- that job is on our desk.
Which brings us to taco
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
First agriculture, then manufacturing, then services.
In 1900, agriculture employed 55% of the civilian labor force. Now, about 2%, depending how you count seasonal labor. In 1970 manufacturing was about 35% (IIRC) of US employment. Now, 14% and falling. In 2011, services employ over 70% of the labor force. In 2041, ..?
In services the big occupation is "cashier", with "retail supervisor" next (again, IIRC. Check the Bureau of Labor Statistics website if interested.) A comment up-thread talked about bus- and
Re:There is Always More Work to Do (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. More efficiency is always good. If the benefits of that increased efficiency are not distributed equally, that's a problem with the economic system, not the automation.
Re: (Score:2)
that's a problem with the economic system, not the automation.
Problem solved, well done. Are you a middle manager by any chance ?
So you are a commie, then? (Score:1)
When machines are so effective that only 10% of the population must work in order for 100% to have its needs met, what economic system do you use to distribute the products?
Realize that in order for any kind of labor-reducing machine to be economically viable its total cost of ownership must be less than the money it saves by eliminating human labor. So the existence of machines creates jobs (production, maintenance, etc...) but the total money that flows into those jobs is *and must be* less than the mone
Re: (Score:2)
A base-level income and solid standard of living should be given to all, but those with the ambition, skillset and drive to do work for the good of society should be rewarded for doing so by earning larger incomes and thus being able to sustain an improved standard of living.
That way, everyone is guaranteed a reasonable standard of living, but exceptional people can still aspire to rise above.
But it won't happen as long as the stodgy old conservatives continue to use "socialism" and "communism" as great big
Re: (Score:2)
Your threading dangerously close to communism there, consumer. Please report to your nearest Homeland Security officer.
Re: (Score:1)
And lack of https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_mobility [wikimedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Not the economic system, the political system. The willingness to redistribute income is a political decision.
Economics has something to say about methods and their consequences only.
Re: (Score:2)
You could also think of industrial machines like agricultural slaves in US history.
Push down the wages of the free workers, enrich the large plantation holders, impoverish many more people who can't compete with what is essentially extraordinarily cheap labor.
Re: (Score:2)
You could also think of industrial machines like agricultural slaves in US history.
Push down the wages of the free workers, enrich the large plantation holders, impoverish many more people who can't compete with what is essentially extraordinarily cheap labor.
Sure, you could think that way. But why would you? It hasn't been true in practice.
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't? Take a look around.
We're in an era where workers are extraordinarily productive, yet average wages keep falling, and the wealth of the ownership class has increased massively.
Re: (Score:2)
We're in an era where workers are extraordinarily productive, yet average wages keep falling, and the wealth of the ownership class has increased massively.
Easily explained by the globalization of labor. It's not that human workers are competing with machines, but that human workers are competing with cheaper human workers. Of course, you'd expect both that the price of labor in the most expensive parts of the world would decline and that owners, whose property doesn't decline in value, wouldn't suffer declines in their wealth.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say it's both. As far as a business is concerned, they don't really care how a job gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible for an acceptable level of quality. If that can be done with a machine, they'll do it with a machine. If that means outsourcing to a cheaper labor pool, they will outsource.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say it's both. As far as a business is concerned, they don't really care how a job gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible for an acceptable level of quality. If that can be done with a machine, they'll do it with a machine. If that means outsourcing to a cheaper labor pool, they will outsource.
Of course both are going on. But the industrial age started more than a century ago and human worker wages have increased considerably since then. When developed world labor was exposed to cheap developing world labor, then the value of that labor started to decline.
Re: (Score:2)
The last few decades (in the US, at least) has seen stagnant real incomes for all but the top few percent (the "large plantation holders").
Or, in other words, effectively all the productivity, efficiency and wealth gains resulting from the last few decades of technology and innovation, have gone nearly entirely into the pockets of a handful of people, at the cost of everyone else.
Re: (Score:2)
The last few decades (in the US, at least) has seen stagnant real incomes for all but the top few percent (the "large plantation holders").
Or, in other words, effectively all the productivity, efficiency and wealth gains resulting from the last few decades of technology and innovation, have gone nearly entirely into the pockets of a handful of people, at the cost of everyone else.
No it hasn't. What has happened is that the global labor pool has more than doubled in size over the past few decades due to globalization. And the developed world hasn't tried particularly hard to make its workers valuable relative to the new labor markets which have opened up.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it has, which is why the incomes of the top few percent have skyrocketed while everyone else keeps running as fast as they can to go nowhere.
How can they when "valuable" is a synonym for "cheap" ?
Re: (Score:2)
How can they when "valuable" is a synonym for "cheap" ?
They can start by making their workers cheaper to employ by a) reducing the cost of employing people (for example, reducing or eliminating employer-side payments for public pensions, health care, etc), b) reducing the cost of complying with regulation (both by streamlining compliance paperwork and cutting regulation that doesn't meet a reasonable cost/benefit threshold), c) cut overall government spending and reduce tax burden on the w
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. Better than they were, certainly. But the wealth distribution in most of those countries is even worse than it is in the developed world.
Re: (Score:2)
So, throw away nearly all the quality of life benefits gained from decades of productivity and technology and race to the bottom ? What a great idea !
I suppose we can just not employ developed world workers instead and lose those quality of life benefits in some other way. The race to the bottom is already happening. Better I think, to make prudent sacrifices now than have the entire system collapse later.
Re: (Score:2)
Or we could, you know, aim for a more equitable distribution of wealth so that everyone can live a good life, rather than a handful living an unbelievably luxurious one and the rest a subsistence one.
Re: (Score:2)
Or we could, you know, aim for a more equitable distribution of wealth so that everyone can live a good life, rather than a handful living an unbelievably luxurious one and the rest a subsistence one.
What has our developed world societies done to deserve that "more equitable" distribution of wealth? My view is that the very people who are now demanding an "equitable distribution" are the same people who created the current distribution of wealth and endorsed the current failures of the system.
The wealthiest have an inherent advantage in dealing with burdensome regulation. And those trinkets which you call "quality of life benefits" are the public's bribes for going along with various scams. Well, in
Re: (Score:2)
Created most of it.
The top 0.1% are demanding a more equitable distribution ?
Re: (Score:2)
Publicly funded education, healthcare and social safety nets, health and safety regulations, worker's rights, clean water, sanitation, etc, are not "trinkets".
It's interesting how you equate clean water and sanitation with workers' rights, health care, and social safety nets. The difference is that the former two are essential parts of a society while the latter, if the price is pretty low, are merely nice to have (except maybe the euphemistically named "workers' rights"). Some places do sensible publicly funded education and health and safety regulations, but too often that stuff is abused.
And how can this stuff be "abused"? Rent seeking and fraud. Workers' r
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, to keep in tune with the article, we should let machines run regulations. A machine can't take bribes.
There's a certain sense to that. But the machine and/or regulation should have a sunset provision in it. I'm leery of regulations that might last to the heat death of the universe.
Re: (Score:2)
Firstly, I didn't claim they were all equivalent. Merely that they were significant factors in the quality of life advantages of the developed world over the developing world.
Secondly, they mi
Re: (Score:2)
"Social safety nets" provide a lot of business for the businesses and such that end up processing the funds or providing relevant services. And there's the government agencies that gain power as the result of enforcing the regulation or restricting access to the public good in question. Fraud also is a typical outcome since it is politically lethal to fail to provide an offered service, but not politically lethal to provide that service in error.
And naturally this sort of thing is completely unheard of in private industry.
I disagree. We have a variety of means for making investments in stocks, bonds, and other things. There are plenty of companies willing to expedite that or manage your investments.
The real shame is that these bribes not only don't keep standards of living from declining, but they actively contribute to making the problem worse.
I guess that's why all the places with the highest living standards in the world are Libertarian strongholds without any of that pesky regulation, those fraud-ridden public services, and the productivity-destroying, extortionist unions. o.O
There are no Libertarian strongholds (they require a very proactive citizenry, which distinguishes them from mere anarchies) and I grant that maybe they can't exist or require infrastructure that wouldn't be maintained by the Libertarian society. But it's worth noting that all of the wealthiest societies with a few exceptions like
Re: (Score:2)
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job.... I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
Are we in the same boat? I think so.
I could summarize my (our?) experience as "for almost a decade and a half, at a couple places, I've used open source "stuff" to develop very closed source non-distributed complete vertical market systems for internal use only"
The real money is in complete systems development not software development. Can I personally make money writing yet another SNMP trap catcher or yet another relational database? Not really. Can I personally make money by putting the two together,
Re:There is Always More Work to Do (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're begging the question. Even if there was always more work to do in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean there will be in the future. However I don't even agree with that assumption.
Your grandparents were farmers and you are not, but that doesn't mean that machines destroying farming as a job leads to "more work." It just means that you found work elsewhere; somebody else very well may have not. You "took" somebody else's job, the machines didn't magically create it for you out of the rubble of the jobs they replaced.
I do agree with you partially: There is always work to be done, but not necessarily more work. Short of some extremely advanced and downright scary AI, there will always be jobs in this hypothetical world for programming the robots, and always work for mechanics repairing the robots. There will always be work to do in research. There will always be some degree of a service sector -- especially once we decide that those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job. But all these things will shrink. They will not support hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and even if they magically could not everybody is suited for these jobs.
And that's assuming most of the jobs left actually stay in the country, which there is little reason to believe that they will for areas like software.
There will always be work, but there won't always be enough work, and our system of values and economy will have to change in ways I can't even fathom the workings of.
Re: (Score:2)
He is no longer a dirt farmer, he is most likely doing an activity humans were not doing before or doing much less of before. Before the industrial revolution most people spent most of their time working in agriculture. Some people were producing metal works, constructing buildings, practicing law, manufacturing soft beds, elegant woven patterns in cloth of many colors, etc, and nobody was writing software.
Along comes the industrial revolution and all its labor saving devices. Suddenly you and I can affo
Re: (Score:2)
I have no idea which post to begin with, but how about here for a start. The reactionary claim that technology (or outsourcing) destroys more jobs than it creates is categorically false. On the consumption side, given a middle-class which can actually consume what it produces, say that item A undergoes outsourcing/automation/efficiency optimization. Thus A becomes cheaper due to competition. The consumer can now afford A and B for the former cost of the pre-optimized item A. The producer spends less labor t
Re: (Score:1)
Frankly I think, in the future, the "repairing robots" jobs will be similar to the "repairing washing machines" jobs of today -- not worth the time of the people who own them, and only performed by scrap scavengers on a less-than-economical basis.
Re: (Score:2)
If there's not going to be "enough" work to support everybody on a full-time basis but there's enough productivity to supply everyone's needs, why keep people working? This whole notion of a "job threat" is absolute bullshit. What happened to the days when automation would create a utopia of ease and leisure, eh?
Re: (Score:1)
In the past, automation has nearly always opened up new opportunities. However, there is no mathematical equation that says that will always continue. Whether we reached the "end" or not is hard to tell, almost like trying to figure out if you are in an economic bubble before it pops. Machines are getting smarter, but humans are not. Is there a point where machine smarts ruin the usual trend?
Re: (Score:2)
I just want to say that make-work labor ("those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job") is one of the worst ideas ever.
Work (as opposed to productive play) is a degrading part of human life. With the exception of a few people who love their jobs (and are thus spending their days playing), the time a person spends working drains from the precious little time they have on this Earth. Work has always been an awful necessity in the past, something that had to get done or else things wou
Re: (Score:2)
Re:There is Always More Work to Do (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards)."
Plenty of us can do those things. We share our insights via the internet instead of by mimeographed newsletters. If we are "thrust backwards" the knowledge will survive and propagate. We have hundreds of years of technology to choose from.
Self and wife raise chickens, who are healthier because of what we learned on the internet even though we have plenty of farmer friends we also ask for info. We obtain parts for our 1937 Chevrolet truck (and our other trucks and motorcycles) via Ebay. I use Purox oxy-acetylene torches which are essentially unchanged since the 1930s. I learned about them via the internet, and can have most any part I wish in-hand in a few days.
Modern technology offers many ways to learn about less-modern technology. Being "thrust backward" is unlikely, but modern information tech makes learning about the spectrum of useful tech much easier.
I grew up before computers were commonplace. If anyone tells you those were "the good old days", punch them in the throat with my compliments.
"Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better."
Of course. Open Source means you aren't locked out like some sharecropper from land he'll never control.
Re: (Score:2)
Open source, whether in software, music, literature, or knowledge, prevents rent-seeking. The fight will always be between those who want to create/work once and continue to reap the benefits repeatedly vs those who profit for unit of time/energy expended.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're not acknowledging the GPs legitimate point. There is a great deal of technology that is at risk of being lost. It's not the 1930s kind, it's more like the 1750s kind. Look at what came out of the toaster project [thomasthwaites.com]. Very simple things, like smelting ore, proved to be nearly impossible for him to discover. He couldn't find it on the internet.
Additionally, the GP is not talking about a world where things are pretty much as now, but somehow technology retreats. He's clearly suggesting a scenario wh
Re: (Score:2)
"but to claim that you, or just about anyone else, is prepared because you're handy in a few or even a few dozen ways is hubris."
Humans are TEAM players. You won't have to do it all yourself unless you are ALONE and then all you need do find water and kill for food.
The farmers would be supported by artisans (many farmers are "techies" themselves) and breeding draft animals is old news. There are plenty of mules happy to make more mules, and plenty of folks still producing tack. These technologies aren't dea
Re: (Score:3)
It the number of people working in agriculture is any indication then yes, machinery did ruin agriculture jobs.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There will always be more work to be done.
If you think of "work" and "spending time to transform something into a more valuable form" then "yes".
I think that instead of changing trees and rock into building materials the future will be more geared towards changing humans into more advanced humans.
Figuring out what the appropriate wage should be to transform a couch potato into an athlete is debatable. Figuring out what the appropriate wage for transforming a computer scientist into an astronautical engineer or a graphical artist is further debat
Have you looked at employment statistics lately? (Score:4, Insightful)
And by lately, I mean ever?
Dude, I hate to break this to you, but combines and tractors DID ruin agriculture jobs in the United States. Time was that a majority of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Now we're down to about 1% of the workforce.
And sure, in the past, all those displaced ag workers found other work, including doing things like building the tractors and combines. But if we get to the point (as suggested by TFA) where suddenly, large swathes of the workforce are being replaced all at once by robots... what then? The robots build themselves (not entirely, obviously, but without a lot of human labor required), so there's no help there.
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What the hell are we going to do then? Not work as much.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway. Read this: http://douglassocialcredit.com/resources/resources/social_credit_by_ch_douglas.pdf [douglassocialcredit.com] If economics was not so corrupt, C. H. Douglas would now be regarded as the Einstein of economics.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?
The only sane thing to do then is to abolish money.
Re: (Score:2)
There's always more work to do, until they build HedonismBot. That will finally be a sign that something has gone too far. Until then, the robots are just helping us all to become HedonismMeatbags.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
Assuming the means of chicken-rearing or plant cultivation have not been done away with (thanks Monsanto for your terminator genes!), people will re-learn the skills needed to survive.
Re: (Score:1)
Combines may have made it possible to increase an individual farmer's output, but at what cost? Haven't we all experienced the replacement of the quality, handcrafted item with the cheap plastic mass produced part planned to break in x years (or months)? Sure that's acceptable for some things, but with our food?
Food security is enabling, empowering. And if you're considering it back-breaking, or doing so much of the same task as to need machines, or to consider the work boring, you're doing it wrong. We
Re: (Score:2)
"There will always be more work to be done"
You're almost right - in fact I agree with your whole post, except for one wrinkle: the 'work' to be done isn't really work at all. It's just creative time-wasting.
A long time ago, we passed the point where it actually took a reasonable chunk of work on the part of every person on Earth to keep all the people on Earth alive, fed, basically clothed and housed.
Ever since then, we've been playing increasingly elaborate shell games in which we introduce a new field of
Re: (Score:2)
the good news is that the socio-political-economic system by which we achieve this is a pretty robustly designed one, and there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why it won't allow us to keep coming up with ever more ridiculous uses of our time indefinitely, as we continue to automate the things we previously had to do ourselves.
the only bad news, i suppose, is that the ridiculous uses of our time which we invent seem to wind up being resource- and space-intensive as well as labor- and time-intensiv
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that we're already seeing a serious shortage of jobs in the industrialized world. The US is not alone in this problem.
"Get another job" is a cop-out.
Re: (Score:1)
The only reason to have a human do a job is because either we can't make a machine do it, or we don't want to. And in the long run, the people paying for the work will choose whichever is the most cost effective.
So I find the argument that there will always be more work to be done is questionable. Maybe there will
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, in 1900 41% of the country was working agriculture.
Now it's 2%. So I would say that Combines and tractors *did* ruin agricultural jobs. Luckily for all of those farm hands though we had other unskilled labor to choose from.
This time the machines aren't just coming for the uneducated... it's coming for the middle class.
Re: (Score:2)
I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time.
And how much of it needs to be written by human beings?
Re: (Score:2)
I applaud your comments, as they truly speak truth about what we should be viewing this situation as, just a means to create different jobs then the ones we have now.... in a few years from now, when robots are flipping burgers, we will be designing ships to go into space that far exceed the ones we have now....we will need to roganize and test and this is where the new job market will be,.....the future always brings new technologies and also new jobs for those technologies....just look at how many people
Re: (Score:2)
What is usually left out in this discussion is that there must exist a new sector for displaced workers to go, and that sector must be one those same workers can contribute to.
Assume for a moment, that none of a displaced workers skills are transferable except the most fundamental (literacy, public speaking, physical stamina). When a worker leaves agriculture, they have to find another job. If a manufacturing job screwing pieces together is available, a farm hand can probably transition to that job in only