Robot Workforce Threatens Education-Intensive Jobs 496
An anonymous reader writes "For years, robots have been replacing workers in factories as technology has come to grips with high-volume, unskilled labor. An article in Slate makes the case that the robot workforce is poised to move into fields that require significantly more training and education. From the article: 'In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible — they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing — robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can't afford lawyers today. But there's a dark side, too: Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner — and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?'"
sue (Score:2)
the manufacturer and retire....
Re:sue (Score:4, Informative)
Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.
Re:sue (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, they will move the lawyer jobs to India, then to China, then to some island country....
Whoops, it is already happening. Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
But anyways, just look at low paying unskilled jobs now.... robots did not take over like the article seems to indicate, nope... instead they went to China, where you work in a building and rent a refrigerator box in another from the same company you work for. It is still cheaper than robots.
This is only true while labor is really cheap. There are a huge number of goods you can make in the US or China at basically the same cost but in China you pay pennies to manual laborers, in the US you program robots to do it. That is happening in China right now as Foxconn is investing in robots due to rises in Chinese labor rates.
Granted there are some new jobs overseeing the robots, programming them, etc but overall the number of warm bodies required per unit of economic output will continue to go down over time.
We will eventually need to shift to a shorter work-week for the same relative pay or we'll need to find new areas for expansion in space. The alternative is to jump back to feudalism prior to the black death when labor was cheap and most people worked as serfs barely scratching out a living. I would point out that the black death brought about a huge increase in labor mobility as there weren't enough hands to till the fields; people migrated (including illegally) to work for new lords that offered better benefits and pay. I really hope we can avoid that fate this time around (massive death via war or disease required to change the status quo).
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I read some of the article and it appears to be a futurist's ramblings on what s/he thinks robots will do, of course they will go terminator style eventually and kill us all, etc..
1. Please please replace my IT job with a robot, I would love to see it fail, and do nothing about it.
2. The concept of AI is beyond the scope of this article, but I believe the consensus is that it is not truelly achievable meaning... robots will never be able to: emotionally reason, have consciousness, or reproduce short of a fa
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I am truly interested in the advances of which you speak, and the reasoning behind a "h
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Basically, if you're willing to admit that humans are in fact made of matter like the rest of the known universe, there's no fundamental barrier to eventual AI of some sort.
E=mc^2, so there's no "fundamental reason" why a big enough nuclear explosion can't spontaneously turn into a fluffy pink unicorn.
Re:sue (Score:5, Insightful)
Environmental pollution and offshoring (Score:5, Insightful)
"We are exporting our toxic waste to China by sending out the manufacturing. There's more to cost of manufacture than just assembly, but nobody on Slashdot ever seems to consider such things."
This is insightful; thanks. This is a major problem with "free trade" agreements, not accounting for externalities.
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And supporting oppressive regimes through US foreign policy is then only a problem if you live in Saudi Arabia? (Hint, where were most of the 9/11 hijackers from?)
Also, do you want China's nuclear arsenal to be commanded by someone suffering from growing up with mercury poisoning?
Do you want the next flu epidemic coming from an area of China with peopele whose immune systems have been weakend by pollution?
And do you want US jobs lost while those risks are made more likely?
Also, coudld some future global law
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And tell me what happens when someone finally reduces the size of robots to molecular machines and we can fabricate anything from a car to a steak from raw atomic stock. Then you can manufacture anything anywhere, and the important thing now becomes the molecular recipe for the Lexus, not the Lexus itself. Those anyone can have for the cost of the raw atoms and the electricity required to assemble them. What does that do to the economy? Everything is now priced be how long it takes to make it and some arbit
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How is the US doing that exactly?
They have interest rates at 0. They've been QEing like Argentina. They've been running huge budget deficits.
All of those things are supposed to apply downward pressure on a currency. So what exactly do you think the US is doing to manipulate its currency to artificially high levels?
Re:sue (Score:4, Interesting)
Doctors on India are viewing your x-rays and diagnosing your issues. (I know this to be true because I helped set it up.)
A few years ago there was a kerfuffle about the transcribing of patient records being outsourced to India (or somewhere) because (I believe) that it broke some regulations about patient confidentiality etc. So how does your system hold up under a regulatory eye, and what protections do the patients have under malpractice etc (assuming that they even know their records are going offshore). Are these doctors in India considered staff of the medical clinic? Or have the clinics using your system washed their collective hands of the issue?
I'm not implying that doctors in India are bad, just that patients expect their doctors to be working under the regulatory guidelines of where the clinic is located.
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Well (Score:3)
If you're getting $400/hour for something a machine can do, then you wasted your time in law school and clerking. Computers are getting better, but AI still isn't that good. If a computer is making you obsolete, then it's time for you to step up to the next level, use the computer for what it's good at, use your brain for what it's good at, and come up with a package that's actually worth the $400/hour you want people to pay you.
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The Law is Black and white anyways... I mean how much more True/False can you get?
I hear the spirit of the law is white as a bedsheet.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a misunderstanding of law. For one, if law was black and white, there would be no need for judges which may be your point. People may miss judges if we went with black/white law because there will be no evolution in law. There are always new issues to litigate and ponder like stem cells, hacking, deep packet inspection, copyright on the internet, robotic rights, clones, artificial intelligence, etc. How does a robot respond to new ideas that are not covered by law? Constitutionalists seem to argue this point frequently as they would prefer the law was black and white and administered the way the authors of the constitution "intended". Robots would suit them nicely, but I am sure they are not prepared for the consequences of living with law that was made centuries ago.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Laws are often ambiguous or conflict with each other -- a large purpose of appellate courts is resolving such issues. But setting that aside, even if we were to assume perfect black/white laws, the facts that must be fed to these laws are often gray and very often completely opposed.
Car analogy: Take the simple legal proposition that if you cause a car wreck, you are going to have to pay for the other party's medical expenses caused by your negligence (but not for any conditions not caused by your negligence). At trial, two equally qualified medical experts testify, one stating that the rearendee's neck condition was a direct result of the physical forces of the accident, and the other that the physical forces were too weak to cause any harm, rather, the neck condition is nothing more than the natural progression of injuries suffered ten years ago while skiing. Both doctors explain their opposite positions well and back up their opinions with peer reviewed medical science.
The law itself doesn't answer this question of causation -- it merely creates a framework of liability rules and admissible evidence in which the question of causation can be asked of a jury or a judge. A simple T/F computer program would not be able to make a decision in such a case on any basis other than chance. While a jury might use gut feeling rather than a coin flip to decide the issue, and ultimately that is perhaps much like a decision based on chance, most people would probably object to having their cases decided by dice or the digital equivalent.
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The Law is Black and white anyways...
The law would be more black and white if laws were better drafted. But they're not. They've often appallingly sloppily drafted - which means they're open to interpretation.
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Some $400 per hour jobs have that salary becuase it is that difficult to do and requires an exceptional person to be able to perform it. Others pay that much because while easy enough, no-one wants to do that job so it is offered with a stupendous salary to make it more attractive.
A few examples of highly paid jobs that could be done by just about anyone with a little training:
- Mine Removal - sure there is training, but the majority of the pay is for the danger, not the expertise required to do the job.
- Drug Running - Okay, not an official job title no doubt, but drug trafficers are payed loads of money to do a really simple job. It is just risky as buggery.
Other highly paid jobs such as working on an Oil Platform or in a Mining Pit may not require a huge range of training and experience, but due to location you might well be apart from friends and family for weeks on end. Recently in Australia there has been a bit of a mining boom in Western Australia. The mining companies are paying insane salaries just to entice people to go work in the middle of the Australian desert.
If your $400 hour job falls into the second bracket and there is indeed now a robot that can do the job, tough luck. Find something else that no-one wants to do :)
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I didn't really think of that aspect of it... I usually see it as a positive thing that robots can now do risky work, so we don't have to put people in danger to do it. I didn't stop to think that those people in danger were being paid very well to do so.
I guess the natural transition for those people would be to learn how to operate the robots that did the job they used to do. Probably won't need as many people doing that though, so there's still a lot of people looking for work.
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I was more talking about some jobs just being paid a "danger" aspect to the salary.
It is a positive thing in general if we can train a robot to do some highly dangerous work, not only because it means that we can remove the need for some poor sap to have to take those risks, but it also means that we can as a whole keep getting better and better robots. The flipside is that some chap was probably paid a damned fine salary to do it.
Think, if we had bipedal robots walking around, able to interact with their e
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Recently in Australia there has been a bit of a mining boom in Western Australia. The mining companies are paying insane salaries just to entice people to go work in the middle of the Australian desert.
Don't believe what you see in the media. Mining jobs are not that well paid. The workers' annual wage seems high, but they generally work 14 x 12 hour days (the equivalent of 4 x 40 hour weeks) every three weeks. They're mostly getting somewhere in the region of AUD35 an hour, which isn't really particularly good money.
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Factoid: 98% of people who go to law school don't end up practicing law. I heard that, but I don't really believe it. But the plausibility of it is enough.
What do you do now? (Score:2)
Buy one. It's a tool, not a lawyer.
Re:What do you do now? -- (Score:2)
The possibilities are endless.
Teleroboxer (Score:2)
Virtual Doc: You've got: leprosy. (Score:2)
Lisa: Maybe I ought to check with the doctor.
[Lisa, Bart, and Homer gather around Lisa's
computer. She starts a program that displays a
medical logo -- the one with two snakes wrapped
around a staff]
Snake 1: Welcome to "Virtual Doctor."
Snake 2: From the makers of "Dragon Q
self checkouts seems to be on the way out so maybe (Score:3)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-grocers-start-bagging-selfserve-checkouts-20110926,0,1600176.story [chicagotribune.com]
http://consumerist.com/2011/09/report-fewer-supermarket-shoppers-using-self-checkout-machines.html [consumerist.com]
so maybe you will see some of this being tried out just to have it fail.
Premise is pretty silly, but... (Score:2)
The answer is: write the AI code for such a robot.
I'm assuming that a law-trained robot is not possible with just a small code base and a library of law texts. If such a robot is possible at all, it will require thousands of hours of laboriously writing
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This doesn't make sense. Just because a profession could be replaced by a computer program doesn't mean its practitioners were not highly educated. It means they were highl
robot lawyers (Score:2)
Wow, cool. So other than some monetary issues, we will now finally get to shoot all the lawyers without facing murder charges. I'm all for it, where's my 50 cal...
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http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=13494 [ncsl.org]
It may not be murder, but shooting a computer can still get you jail time.
What do you do? (Score:2)
...you get a subsidy, kick part of it back to your pet senator, and sue your way into perpetual employment.
Think of all the buggy-whip manufacturers! Think of all the typewriter repairmen! And the telegraph operators! It's an assault on the wooooooooorkers!
Not really a joke. For displaced workers, it's going to be a problem, and the first things you reach for are always the lawyers and the politicians. The first thing you seek is protectionism. Career-for-life as an idea is as deeply ensconced as it is
completely, utterly, tragically, wrong (Score:3)
this is not 'buggy whip manufacturers'. this is mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale. there is no 'automobile industry' to replace the "buggy whip industry" in 2011, there is just a yawning, gaping void. once you automate automation itself, there is nothing to go on to. people cannot afford to go back to college a 2nd or 3rd time and get retrained, owing $40,000 in loans, and then, 3 years later, have to go back again and get re-retrained. computer science graduates are a dime a dozen, and a bunch of
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this is not 'buggy whip manufacturers'. this is mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale.
I'm sure they said that two hundred years ago when automated looms took over from people working at home by hand. Oddly, there are far more people working today than there were back then.
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You failed to address the point he made about the automation of automation. What happens when most jobs are replaced by robots designed by robots?
Until we have AI that's as smart as humans, there will be plenty of jobs for humans to do, so long as they get off their butt and don't sit around complaining about how their super-important job actually turned out to be so simple that a computer can do it better. We've been replacing jobs with 'robots' for decades and we still have more people working than we did when we started to do so.
Once we have AI that's as smart as humans, we're fscked. But that's still probably at least a century away.
What you fail to understand is that there may be an opportunity or even a need for people to do intelligence-intensive tasks that can't be automated, but these are much much fewer than there is intelligent and capable people able to perform those jobs. How many designers and engineers do Apple or Samsung or Google need to come up with The Next Big Thing? and how many workers (robotic or otherwise) do they need to materialize those designs?
The number of people keeps rising, if automation takes over all menia
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Summary: Forcing people to learn new skills to be employed is not the same thing as making all the jobs go away.
When the people who make money from productivity can multiply productivity deploying machines instead of hiring workers, they no longer have a reason to share that income with anyone, so they end up with all the money and nobody else has any. When the robots are building the robots, the circle will close.
That's the system we're building at one end, while some people are actively tearing down the
If they can oursource MBA's by using robots... (Score:2)
It will all have been worth it.
Robots Don't Have Souls! (Score:2)
Will a robotic lawyer be able to be a public defen (Score:2)
Will a robotic lawyer be able to be a public defender or will it fail a constitution test?
You could recolonize Australia ... (Score:3)
here's a third- also worth a read- if a bit darker (Score:2)
http://www.freebooks4u.net/ScienceFiction/Radiant_Doors.html [freebooks4u.net]
--and a snippit--
"It was automation that did it or, rather, hyperautomation. That old bugaboo of fifty years ago had finally come to fruition. People were no longer needed to mine, farm, or manufacture. Machines made better administrators, more attentive servants. Only a very small elite–the vics called them simply their Owners–were required to order and ordain. Which left a lot of people who were just taking up space."
How long is Manna? (Score:2)
writing stories just like this one (Score:2)
In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible — they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one.
Yeah right. Like i'd believe anything written by a robot.
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Ah, naivety (Score:4, Interesting)
First, at the high end, I suspect that a $ 400 per hour lawyer with a robot assistant would run rings around a robot lawyer, and that that would be true regardless of the quality of the robot lawyer (as the $ 400 / hour guy would be able to afford a robot assistant of the same quality.
Second, there is something that is not being broached here - who benefits from this ? And what determines that ? Suppose that robots could do all jobs. So, what, everyone, being unemployed, just sits in the dark and starves ? Or, everyone except a few robot owners sits in the dark and starves ? And, how, exactly, would those starving people afford the goods and services being turned out by the robots ? Believing that would happen is naive in the extreme. Doesn't mean what will happen is necessarily going to be good, but it will be different.
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Re:Ah, naivety (Score:4, Insightful)
So, what, everyone, being unemployed, just sits in the dark and starves ?
I think that would be one of the best times to scrap our money-driven society.
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What? Why is the level of education important? (Score:2)
How about the same thing the factory worker does when he's replaced by automation or his job is outsourced to cheaper labor markets. Survive. Adapt. Why is it so unthinkable that highly educated people would be put out of work by progress, instead of simply the low wage laborers?
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It used to be that education was the way to "survive and adapt". If that changes we'll have to come up with something to substitute for it.
Charge less or learn to maintain your AI masters. (Score:2)
Rework your assumption that having studied law allows you to charge $50 for reading my email while on the John. I forked over about $60k to have a lawyer help me with the intricacies of overseas inheritances. In practice, it amounted to little more than telling me what documents I needed to have, and then forwarding them to the IRS. I always felt weird wearing shorts and t-shirt to the face-to-face meetings. Then I figured that they were the same as the $2k suit that the lawyer was wearing - after all, I wa
What about etiquette and protocol? (Score:2)
Oh, yes! Remember that I am fluent in over six million forms of communication.
What're you telling them?
Hello, I think... I could be mistaken. They're using a very primitive dialect, but I do believe they think I am some sort of god.
Well, why don't you use your divine influence and get us out of this?
I beg your pardon, General Solo, but that just wouldn't be proper.
"Proper?!"
It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.
Or maybe not (Score:2)
Robots, due to the initial investment, may not turn out to be as cost effective as imagined. When Toyota opened their first plant in Japan in the last 18 years [cnn.com], they went for low cost of building the factory, and fast manufacturing times instead of complex robotics to minimize wages/benefits.
In an age where things like company agility is valued, and start-up capital (including commercial lines of credit) is very limited, I'm not sure that robots are going to beat humans on price any time soon.
Lawyer (Score:2)
Anyone who works regularly with lawyers (as I do, (and I'm a geek (as demonstrated by these nested parens))) will know that it will take nothing short of full strength AI to replace them, lawyer jokes aside. There is so much nuance, subtlety, and tweaking of agreements that a using a simple computerized approach won't work for a substantial portion of what (say) normal corporate law firms do. If we magically move to a machine readable contract language, portions of contract verification might be automated
This will finally kill capitalism. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Butlerian Jihad!!!!!
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Since, it can't cope with people not being needed, as even if it'd be economically feasible, it refuses to provide people with anything free. When human work becomes obsolete, and unemployment crosses some threshold, there will be widespread revolts. Compare with industrial revolution and Luddites.
Socialism will up against the wall before capitalism because its workers will be more expensive and hence, obsoleted first. I can see several endstates (none of which are mutually exclusive): 1) some degree of rejection of technology, enabling humans to compete for certain jobs, 2) improving humans so that they can compete with the new robotics (this probably would entail a merging of human and machine), or 3) we find that there are comparative advantages to human labor that don't go away.
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Sabotage, obviously (Score:2)
Sabot (Score:3)
These fears have been around for decades, at least (Score:2)
Remember the Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie "Desk Set?"
What about that Twilight Zone episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's?"
Go do something else. (Score:2)
And if you can't, too bad.
What Would Lawyers Do? (Score:5, Funny)
"Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner — and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?'"
Sue!
Scarcity. (Score:2)
I, for one ... (Score:2)
Bag groceries (Score:2)
article doesn't contain what the /. summary says (Score:5, Insightful)
The article doesn't contain what the /. summary says it contains. The article is actually a come-on for a promised series of blog entries which are supposed to substantiate the claims it makes. The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.
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Perhaps when there is nothing left to do we can spend some of our idle time getting food to the other 6 billion that don't have any.
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As long as the robot/machine that I am to merge with can be made (or my brain can be made to interpret) to look like Lucy Liu, then I'll have no problem.
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The problem is that in order for that to work, there needs to be some guarantees that people will still be able to feed themselves. It doesn't matter whether there's a huge mountain of food on the neighbors table and if all the work is being done by robots if you're starving.
In the US we've chosen to subscribe to the radical notion that the poor deserve to be poor because clearly it's less work to work two jobs for minimum wage than to work one that pays substantially more.
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In the US we've chosen to subscribe to the radical notion that the poor deserve to be poor because clearly it's less worthwhile work to work two jobs for minimum wage than to work one that pays substantially more.
If I leave my job, the management has to go through a difficult and lengthy process of finding a good replacement (made harder by them not understanding the details of what my job requires knowledge-wise). If Jim the gas station attendant or Marge the grocery clerk leave their jobs, it's easy enough to replace them... or maybe just cut their position and make the customers do their job with a minimal amount of automation and some cameras to keep everyone honest.
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That's sort of the point. You have to do something with those people that are no longer able to work because their skills aren't in demand. Personally, I don't think either of us would seriously suggest euthanasia for such people, but I get the feeling that there are plenty of folks out there that would be fine with Marge and Jim starving to death in a box.
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Marshall Brain's science fiction novella, Manna [marshallbrain.com], is based on this premise.
Manna is an AI that was developed to replace middle "manna"gement at fast food restaurants. As its usefulness expands, workplace norms change, and the progression ends with... well, that'd be a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the end state of an economy dr
Re:Cry me a river (Score:5, Funny)
(CEOs could totally be replaced by machines. Oh yes.)
I was under the impression that most CEOs were already poorly programmed machines. And you can't tell me that Steve Jobs isn't at least part robot.
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How can that be true? If Steve Jobs is living tissue over metal endoskeleton, he should last 120 years with his existing power cell...
Re:Cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
2-3 years, not 120. The most an Apple laptop battery lasts is 2-3 years.
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And Steve has to be taken back to the Genius Bar to replace his battery pack.
Yup, it fits all the facts.
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Yeah, you're wrong [lesswrong.com].
Face it, a representative sample of "the elites" made it there through superior intellect and rationality, not luck, inheritance or chance. "The system" is fundamentally just, fair and meritocratic.
Um, most of that is based on his "touch and feel" assessment of CEOs at dinner parties. He disregards charisma, then talks about how these CEOs seemed to "sparkle" with their overflowing "life force".
I'm sure the average CEO is a little smarter than the average bear. But that doesn't mean they don't have an excess of charisma (and a cynical ability to do whatever it takes to be rewarded), while other smart (but less charismatic / greedy) people don't get so high up the ladder.
One of his main ideas - that pe
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Or just learn to be better than the machines.
Seriously, technology rarely kills an industry.
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A machine may be able to interpret the law; what is law, but software?
But, I ask you, can it follow The Three Laws?
1) If the facts are against you, argue the law.
2) If the law is against you, argue the facts.
3) If both the law and the facts are against you, attack opposition's character.
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1) If the facts are against you, pound on the law.
2) If the law is against you, pound on the facts.
3) If both the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.
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Seriously, technology rarely kills an industry.
Technology hasn't really been competitive with people in the past though. And we'll need less and less people managing said machines. There are already "lights out" factories where a few people prep the factory and it just runs unattended for days/weeks.
Sure you might need a couple people as a failsafe but thats 2 jobs vs 200. Those 198 people you now say are "free" to find other jobs but the costs of goods don't necessarily reduce. Just their old salaries go into say.. 80% capital (factory) and 20%
Re:Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Coitus rarely leads to conception. Asteroids rarely strike planets. I don't think that word means what you think it does. A mortal blow matters every time. For a long time machines only had brawn, speed, or stamina. Things are changing at tremendous speed.
We're already seeing a sharp rise in income disparity in America and similar economies. The displacement is incremental, but potent nevertheless, and recent trends suggest this process is accelerating. No one has a convincing model for what the labour force will look like 50 years from now.
As it stands right now, Gary Kasparov would have trouble defeating a high-end cell phone over the chess board. This is an artificial task. Watson is less so. And so it will go. The word "rarely" answers no pressing question.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
It answers the pressing question of whether or not you should quit law school right now.
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Let me be the first to call BS on this AC.
He or She has obviously limited experience fixing _anything_. (Hint the bolts are not preloosened like you see on TV.) A robot may be able to switch out a battery pack, but it will be fucked when the battery pack cover bolts are stripped and rusted in. It will destroy the cover and possibly damage itself trying though.
First tasks for robots happened a good 40 years ago. Drilling holes IIRC. Pre CNC, stepper motors etc. Depends on your definition, could have bee
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I could make more money organizing Flesh Fairs. FUD is FUD.
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Whoah... one of the prototypes is posting on Slashdot!
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the but that can kill people
Leave Goatse out of this.
red light cameras are about income and not safety (Score:2, Informative)
red light cameras are about income and not safety if they where about safety then why was yellow time cut at some palaces with red light cameras?
Self-checkout still needs some to watch over them so you save like what the costs of 1-2 works per shift? likely less as over night you may of only had like 1 cashier any ways. So with self-checkout you don't need to pull as many people off of other jobs at rush times.
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self-checkout makes theft / lost go up (Score:2)
http://mobile.courant.com/p.p?m=b&a=rp&id=856353&postId=856353&postUserId=47&sessionToken=&catId=6225&curAbsIndex=2&resultsUrl=DID%3D6%26DFCL%3D1000%26DSB%3Drank%2523desc%26DBFQ%3DuserId%253A47%26DL.w%3D%26DL.d%3D10%26DQ%3DsectionId%253A6225%26DPS%3D0%26DPL%3D5 [courant.com]
"There certainly is intentional theft, but some of it is not intentional," Claire D'Amour-Daley, Big Y spokeswoman said Friday.
In particular, fruits, vegetables and self-serve bakery items can be misidentified by custom
been to a library lately? (Score:3)
stock & commodities exchanges - tens of thousands of traders out of work
checkout registers - countless cashiers out of work
news aggregators - tens of thousands of journalists out of work
lawyering - tons of laywers from top schools cannot find jobs other than 'document highlighting monkey' paying 12/hour
libraries - people with MLS degrees now say 'oh, reboot it' all day long
book stores - experts in literatue, classic, and modern, now say 'you need to upgrade your firmware' and 'venti or grande'
banks - th
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and IT & maintaining the robot infrastructure take over the world! I knew I was in the right industry.
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Lawyers will make sure laws are enacted to protect their jobs.
Then the robot lawyers will move in and enact laws to protect the robot jobs. And just wait until the robot unions get involved, those parasites - but of course where there are unions, soon there is the mafia - thats right, the robot mafia. Where does it all end - let me tell you, it's not pretty. Soon we will be paying our tax dollars to support the robot welfare state, while those deadbeats leech off government at our expense. The epi-center of this disastrous robot future world - Detroit naturally.
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Alternatively people could get off their ass and find something to do that isn't so simple that a computer can replace them.
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We're heading boldly into a post-capitalist world, where everything is available to everyone at virtually no cost.
LOL. I'll have twelve Ferraris, six aircraft carriers and the USS Enterprise. Oh, and tomorrow I want a space habitat the size of Canada.