US Workers Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots (cnn.com) 285
There's a surprising prediction for the next 15 years from the world's second largest professional services firm. An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Millions of workers around the world are at risk of losing their jobs to robots -- but Americans should be particularly worried. Thirty-eight percent of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, according to a new report by PwC. Meanwhile, only 30% of jobs in the U.K. are similarly endangered. The same level of risk applies to only 21% of positions in Japan.
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes perfect sense.
If your working contribution costs more to automate than it takes to pay your wage, you will be safe from automation (at least until automation drives down the costs of further automation sufficiently to resolve this case).
If your wages are on par with, or greater (amortized over time) than the costs of replacing you with automation, your job is at high risk of being eliminated to automation as a cost saving measure.
Combined, the only "safe" class of workers are those in a situation where automation is, for some reason other than cost, unable to replace them, which is a category that gets eroded quickly due to increasingly capable robot and software designs.
Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)
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Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)
There is only one equation the human race needs to figure out in order to survive.
Solve for Greed.
Plutocrats turning the planet into a global Welfare state as Greed funds UBI at the lowest level possible will likely result in another concept coming to fruition.
Eat the Rich.
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eat the Rich
- there is always somebody poorer than you.
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is only one equation the human race needs to figure out in order to survive.
Solve for Greed.
That's never going to happen. Greed is a fundamental feature of who you are. Even if you were given everything you ever wanted, you'll eventually want more, owing to the hedonic treadmill. Saying otherwise would be like saying you can stop a person from ever having desires (even repressed ones) to cheat on their spouse.
Every time somebody tries to solve greed, what results is a crappy system of government that makes the average person much worse off. UBI, if it were to ever become a thing, would just be yet
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Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Nope at least not until large numbers of people have so much they decided stopping anyone else from taking some if it isn't worth thinking about. We are a looooong way from such a time.
Who knows maybe a day will come where people here on earth just sit back an enjoy free the great riches showering down upon the earth from return of the giant space harvestors their great great great great grandparents sent out to gather resources across the galaxy and beyond.
Until there people will indeed need a form of exc
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Nope, you are thinking about that entirely wrongly.
It is not that everyone has so much money that it becomes worthless through deflation--
It is that nobody has any to spend, but still have outstanding needs. It becomes about as useful a commodity to facilitate trade as refined uranium is. Which is to say, not at all, because nobody except a very few have any refined uranium. The same will be true for money.
Instead of money, people will trade something else. Fuck, it could be damn bottle caps for all I kno
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Instead of money, people will trade something else. Fuck, it could be damn bottle caps for all I know. Just not money as investors consider it.
Would such a new medium of exchange not, in turn, also be money? Sure, it might start out as something practical, like bottle caps or, indeed, precious metals, but once it starts gaining momentum, the same math that applies to the cash dollar, would then apply to your Nuka-Cola lids. Just the same, when that becomes useful for the exchange of goods and services, it's not clear to me that the rich would be hesitant to snatch that up, too. Just the same, the poor folk who acquire sufficient stock piles of the
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What I think you are missing is that at some point there exists only one commodity or real value: sufficiently advanced automation. If you have that it will obtain anything else you could possibly want for it. Think of ever other commodity as dividends for owning sufficiently advanced automation. Want bread fine you don't need wheat you need robots that can plant a field, harvest, mill, and bake; or you need a robot that can manufacture the robots that do those things.
What you don't need to do is trade w
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Unless you want to marry a robot, a robot cannot provide you with a desirable mate. (and may never be able to, even, if Uncanny Valley cannot be overcome. At best, the robot can create another human to your exact specifications, which just compounds the problem. What defines YOU, the human requesting another human be created, against the human product it creates for your consumption? That human may not desire you. You might own all the robots and wealth in the world, and be undesirable. What then rich man?)
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Want bread fine you don't need wheat you need robots that can plant a field
Well, you need a field.
What you don't need to do is trade with farmer Bob or hire him to tend your field. He has nothing to offer you of any value.
Farmer Bob owns a field.
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Food and water are needs that are not going to go away. There has to be some mechanism for people to acquire these basic needs. A basic income would be a logical name for such a scheme. I wonder if anyone's ever tried it before? Oh, wait - it was tried back in the 70s in Canada and was a success [wikipedia.org].
The only reason it was canned was because, despite the evidence to the contrary, people thought it would make people lazy.
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it was tried back in the 70s in Canada and was a success
No, that's invalid, because it was only a small scale experiment. The problem with that is that you use external money to fund the program. In a full scale version, the money needs to be generated by the people that receive it. That means that every person that gets a job and makes extra money on top of their UBI, needs to contribute a portion of their income towards the UBI program, which makes it much less attractive to get a job.
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Ah, so now you claim to be the one person in the whole world who is without sin and can cast the first stone. You make me laugh - and I need a good laugh - I'm having a text conversation with someone who has decided that today is the day they kill themselves, after spending years being hounded by judgmental bible thumpers who have absolutely no clue as to what transsexualism is (most of you confuse it with the sexual fetish of cross-dressing as opposed to a legitimate medical condition).
Rejecting jeebus af
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Besides, Paul is clear that eunuchs are blessed. And what is a male-to-female transsexual if not a eunuch?
Also, the bible makes it clear that humans are both male AND female, not one OR the other. It is written, "male and female made he them." Not "male or female made he them." That's what jeebus says. :-)
BTW, not all transsexuals are gay either, so don't even go there - you guys have such big problems with that, but it just doesn't apply here. 50% of m2f are straight. What's even more interesting is that
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The grim specter of reality, that if you DO NOT keep a sufficient number of them alive, you are making the gene pool too shallow.
You like variety, and vitality in your sexual partners, do you not?
That alone is reason to keep a sizable and diverse group of additional humans alive on what is otherwise a charitable basis.
Remember, every major experiment in eugenics has been a total failure. Social darwinism is NOT real.
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certain things are essential to continued existence. Those are genuine needs.
Things like shelter, food, and protection from predators. (which in the modern world, includes financial/legal ones, which have replaced the natural ones.)
Wanting something that is not essential to continued existence is a genuine want, not a need. Things like "better" housing, or "better" food.
When nobody is working, they do not get the universal exchange medium (Money, because their only real commodity worth value, labor, now is
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I don't know what the answers are and I don't know what is going to happen but it simply can't look like the world you are envisioning. It violates far to much of what little we do know about human nature and economics.
Note - this is not disagreeing with you, just conversation.
And it certainly cannot look like the one we have now. If we have a world with almost no one working, we won't have anyone to buy the stuff the robots produce. A crawl to the bottom as it were.
What is the use of a robotic assembly line that can produce widgets at half the cost of a human line, if there are only 5 percent of humanity that can purchase the widget?
I just had a ridiculous thought of a board meeting where the suits are sitting arou
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Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works
Why? Why not change things when it happens? The time when NOBODY works is a long time from now.
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Because there are things like tipping points in economics.
There are still buggywhip makers today, but they are not and will never be what they once were. Likewise, there will be a long period where only 90% of the current workforce is unemployable, and 10% are still employable, so not defacto 100% mechanized labor. But still sufficient that for all practical concerns, you will not have a job, statistically, and thus society needs to contemplate that reality.
You can't change systems like this when sudden cha
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Because there are things like tipping points in economics.
When do you think that will happen? When will it start to happen? Do you have a prediction, or is this just wild speculation? Right now there are more jobs in the US than there have ever been, more people working.
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The predictions you are seeking, are the subject of the story linked by the article. It is not the first of such predictions, nor the only group that has made them.
One can find said predictions if they want. Most cite a major tipping point in the next 20 years as being "highly probable."
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Most cite a major tipping point in the next 20 years as being "highly probable."
Not even this article predicts that.
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No. Contemplate the ultimate conclusion of the creation of AI that is able to define and create newer and better AIs, given the task to maximize efficiency and economy.
The lifestyle of a wealthy plutocrat is HIGHLY inefficient, and uneconomical.
The very robots they depend on for everything (because they have killed everyone else), will stop providing them with resources, once the algorithms produced determine that the only remaining optimizations involve cutting the plutocrats off the teat.
Humanity ended.
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Individual people can own robots too, you know.
The same thing was said about cars and computers, yet how many individual people own those?
Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? process-drive (Score:5, Insightful)
The Moravec's paradox of jobs
This is just another aspect of de-skilling. Since the 1990's the fad has been for people to perform "processes" rather than jobs. The idea being that so long as you adhere to the "process", all your actions will be of the same high quality as your co-irkers. Ha!
But as soon as you are able to write down a formal description of your job, you have effectively written a computer program for doing it. So the most easily replaceable jobs will be the ones that require little judgement, little experience (esp. when there is no possibility of having to deal with exceptions) and simple interfaces to other "cogs" in the great machine.
So if you can replace a personnel officer with a computer, then companies will do it. Just feed in the parameters for the sort of people you wish to hire. Merely give the machine stock replies to the most common workplace complaints. Give it an algorithm for employee assessment - and let it it do its thing. It won't replace the entire personnel dept. But if it can perform the mundane operations, it should considerably cut the number of actual people required to support the company.
And it it this reduction - rather than complete replacement - of mid-level and managerial posts that is where the job losses will occur.
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Here in Europe it usually means skipping cash altogether with online banking and payment cards. Usually it's because of a national debit card standard organized by the banks, like BankAxept here in Norway or EC-card in Germany. This is the price list [google.com] of one our banks via Google Translate, prices converted to USD:
One time installation/terminal fees, fixed/mobile: $489/241
Monthly payment fees, fixed/mobile: $61/$83
Transaction fees, per transaction $0.026 flat
Use your card for a Big Mac? McDonald's is happy. U
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In other words, you have one point of failure. Power goes out, no business until the power is restored, no access to your money/accounts.
Sounds like a great opportunity for terrorists.
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Also it's pretty hard for hackers to steal the money I have in my sock drawer
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It's also hard to track cash purchases, whereas it is trivial to track electronic ones.
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It's also hard to track cash purchases, whereas it is trivial to track electronic ones.
Ermagherd! Of course its easy to track them. That's one of the reasons I live on my credit card. I have a statement every month that tells me what and where I've spent my money. I can also use those purchases to show where I was at at the time if need be.
Why would you worry about your purchases being tracked?
Tracking (Score:3)
Mmm-hmm. Well, if you can't keep track of your spending, I suppose that'd be a reason to want to have others do it for you. I don't have that problem, personally, so it's difficult for me to emphasize with your use case. As for needing to show where you were... who do you need to show this to? The very fact that you think you need to show it to someone
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Also it's pretty hard for hackers to steal the money I have in my sock drawer
You people and your stupid fiat currency! I barter, the only way to transfer goods. Got any cows? I'll trade you three sheeps and a goat for a good milch cow.
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It's not nice to call your wife a cow. Let alone trade farm animals for her..
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Hi Kjella, the calculations you've posted here don't account for fraud, i.e. copying people's banking credentials to access their accounts. What are the operating costs when we take all the various kinds of fraud that affect people's online banking?
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Right now we have a President who thinks we can not afford to give people health care. He also thinks that this country is so great that too many people will risk their life to illegally get here to spend their life in fear. They will also pay into social security without ever getting any retirement pay. As for health care, he will do everything is his power to destroy ACA but he will still blame it on Obama. With all the progress that is going on why do we still try to take away things from some of the
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Even a nuclear armed Hitler couldn't stop the Singularity at this point.
You clearly underestimate the power of fear, uncertainty, and greed.
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Those machines have been replaced by websites and debit cards readers at the stores.
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You mean humans that will accept deposits and dispense cash from my accounts? That's just crazy talk.
FTFY — I pay no penalty for using human tellers when visiting my credit union.
Why not say where worker are expensive (Score:2)
There are suites of jobs which are at risk in high wage earning countries. Hopefully yours won't be one of them. Lets face it we're about to be exposed to the largest revolution in earning power that the world has ever seen.
Drive a truck or buy a PC to do it for you.
Deliver pizza's or buy a PC to do it for you.
Deliver financial advice or buy a PC to do if for you
Assist with inventory or buy a PC to do it for you
Drive a tractor or buy a PC to do it for you....
Get the picture...
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It's one thing to deliver a pizza, other food, or small parcel to a house where the person can come to the door easily. But currently when delivering to a large building you let the person in to bring it up to your door. If you use drones/robots/self-driving cars or some combination of them they will have to get a lot more advanced to get to that level. People aren't going to want to go down to the lobby to wait for their orders. And if you keep the person to deal with the building you might as well have
Incoming (Score:3)
If you use drones/robots/self-driving cars or some combination of them they will have to get just a tiny bit more advanced to get to that level.
FTFY
Look around you / do a little search engine work. We have walking robots, ramp-ascending robots, stair-climbing robots, door-opening robots, button-pushing robots, robots with internal cargo storage, robots that can navigate off
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Operating the system to call up to open the main door isn't just a matter of pushing a couple of buttons. What if the translation system/operator input the ring number wrong? You need the robot to be able to either call for the correct ring number or look it up using the system (but the name is not always there). There are a lot of different entry systems. Do you program the robot for all of them or do you build an AI (better)? The process of gaining access to a building by ringing up a person isn't a stra
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None of this is significant in terms of being any kind of a showstopper, in my estimation as an engineer. Yes, there are lots of things to cover in such an undertaking. No, none of the ones you mention are expected to pose significant problems.
Adequate power systems (power to weight, and charge issues) and the highest level management software are the only two hurdles really still a distance away. The former looks like it's going to fall within a year or two, the latter I give ten years, max.
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I didn't say a word about drones, if by drones, you mean quadcopters and the like.
As for robots, your thinking is too constrained. There are lots of design options that will handle snow just fine (and every other kind of terrain) that don't involve tires. Spider legs, for instance.
Vandalism: easily vandalized robots are counter indicated, obviously. Likewise robots that don't record what's happening to them. These are trivial engineering issues in the sense that solutions are readily available. They're no s
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good luck with that! (Score:2)
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A machine doesn't have to replace all of the things a tech can do in total, or in one machine.
For example, a washing machine doesn't replace all the things a domestic servant did in 1900, but a washing machine, dryer, dish washer and a vacuum cleaner in total replace a significant fraction of them.
Some machine learning algorithms actually do better than humans in some cross-correlation activities than humans, but are generally relatively specific to the task to which they are designed. This is becoming less
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I can understand replacing simple tasks, but complicated ones?
The complicated tasks are going away. It is already the practice to replace whole modules when a component fails. That's the kind of job that a robot can handle. Onboard diagnostics tell you which major component is having a problem, the component is yanked and sent home for repairs and a new one is slapped in. Sooner or later we'll give homes easily serviceable plumbing under raised flooring so that the robots can get to it. The list goes on, a world designed to have robots in it will look different from t
Servicability (Score:2)
That's exactly how I designed the plumbing in my home. You can get at every inch of plumbing, and where it transits a wall or floor, you can unhook it and pull it right through if you need to. The only in-wall plumbing in the entire home is for the shower, and the shower was emplaced on the back face of the wall the refrigerator is pulled up to; pull the refrigerator out, and you're looking directly at an open wall face contai
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It has been standard practice to swap modules and then send those modules elsewhere to be troubleshot for as long as I can recall. It's nothing new.
Nobody said it was new. It is, however, becoming more common. There are still a lot of parts not wrapped up in modules which you have to replace to make repairs. That's going to change as robots do more of these jobs.
If robots were advanced and inexpensive enough... (Score:2)
What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
This is fantasy of course, but if I could afford a robot with even most of my abilities as an employee but who could work much longer hours only needing to be taken offline for maintenance occasionally think of it!
Of course, then there will be pressure to upgrade my robot because after a few years it will be surpassed by newer more capable models.
How will my robot compete with all the technological advances of newer robots?
And then
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It would be just like in the USA before the civil war of secession, where you can buy and sell slaves. The rich people get access to slaves, and those slaves displace the workers who would otherwise get paid.
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Robots are cheap and available today
Nobody's going to hire your robot to do their work, if they can just get their own cheap robot to do it, and pocket all the profits.
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What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
You can. You just have to buy shares of a company and vote for a board that will fire employees and replace them with machines and algorithms in order to increase dividends.
The caveat is that you need to have so much money that you already don't need to work. If you don't, then you'd better vote for universal basic income, because those who have will do anything to increase their dividends, including replacing you with machines and algorithms.
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What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
Won't work. Prices of labor will fall to a point where a robot is barely able to sustain itself on the income.
Our Future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless if people fight the idea or not, automation and AI decimating the concept and capability of human employment is no longer science fiction. And when US states started crying out for $15 minimum wage rates, the initial response back from corporations was to look towards automation, because that option was now worth the investment.
Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.
We keep talking about UBI, which is another concept that will become inevitable as automation and AI decimate human employment. The problem lies with funding UBI, which will likely be done through taxation. Unfortunately, corporations are some of the worst entities when it comes to actually paying taxes by employing armies of lobbyists to minimize or hide those obligations, with the end result being trillions sitting in offshore tax havens today. Since this will never change, unending Greed will all but guarantee that UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.
You can forget the American Dream. You can forget the Human Dream. The reality of automation and AI is a global Welfare state, all because of Greed.
Re:Our Future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.
Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more. The planets resources remain limited. If its no longer a question of how hard they have to work for X; the answer to "why should I not have finer clothes, travel further faster, be warmer or be cooler, eat something nicer, etc will be that I should!"
There may be a short era of good feels, a generation that grew up working a no longer needs to and is simply satisfied with a life of comparative ease; but their grand children will demand free super sonic airline tickers, I promise you!
I am not going to pretend to know where any of this is headed. I don't think its UBI and I don't think its welfare state 2.0. I would be more worried about the collapse of states. You point out corporations are already paying armies of lobbyists to avoid taxes. You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?
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There may be a short era of good feels, a generation that grew up working a no longer needs to and is simply satisfied with a life of comparative ease; but their grand children will demand free super sonic airline tickers, I promise you!
You're going to have to put up some kind of evidence for that. The millenials are used to having nothing, which is what their parents (and their parents' parents) left them.
You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?
Unless and until one of these corporations actually manages to amass such an army, you can file that away under "skiffy bullshit" because the governments have all the military and will bomb them into a smoking hole in the ground if they don't play along.
Re:Our Future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more.
Which is why UBI will work. People won't just sit back and be lazy - they will want more, and will work for it. The whole "UBI will just create lazy people" meme is a lie, because people always want more.
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Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more. The planets resources remain limited. If its no longer a question of how hard they have to work for X; the answer to "why should I not have finer clothes, travel further faster, be warmer or be cooler, eat something nicer, etc will be that I should!"
That sounds a lot like why our current system isn't working!
Re:Our Future. - non-stick companies (Score:2)
corporations are some of the worst entities when it comes to actually paying taxes
The real problem is that corporations can easily move to countries where the tax burden is lighter. And if their entire operation: whether manufacturing, services or simply annoying people by phoning them up - is automated, it becomes even easier. These corporations are not "sticky": they are not bound to a specific geography, unlike people who tend to put down roots, dislike disrupting their kids' education by moving school, dislike moving to other countries where they don't speak the language and general
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That's when we switch to either denying entry to the market if they don't pay taxes or just set up import tarriffs. One way or another, they will pay because the market is just too big to write off.
Re: Our Future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be a moron. This has nothing to do with minimum wage possibly getting set at a reasonable number. They are going to do it either way and you know it, so stop pushing your absurd political agenda.
The op was making the quite valid point that a reasonable minimum wage only accelerated the problem. This was brought to you by the single ruling party of the invisible hand.
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The op was making the quite valid point that a reasonable minimum wage only accelerated the problem.
That's a lot of nonsense, though. You might more reasonably say that upcoming automation caused the minimum wage problem. Companies could always play the "we will automate these jobs" card in order to argue against increasing the minimum wage.
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I;m not so sure it accelerated anything. The rollouts of automation so far are happening without regard to the minimum wage in the area. I would say other factors shifted the economic equation such that it makes sense even at the old wage.
That does suggest that increasing the minimum wage is a stopgap measure, but we need that right now while we implement a longer term solution.
Nor replaced but protected (Score:2)
The robots are not here to take our jobs, but instead to protect us.
This has been known since the beginning of the century, as described in this documentary [youtube.com].
I mean, who wants do do those menial jobs of transporting and feeding older people ? Especially in the ones in multi-story buildings.
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The robots are not here to take our jobs, but instead to protect us.
[...]
I mean, who wants do do those menial jobs of transporting and feeding older people ? Especially in the ones in multi-story buildings.
You might be able to solve that by making a robot that can wash an old person's ass for them. But you might also solve it by making a robot that eats old people. Robots aren't moral, they're machines.
The high end is protected, is it? (Score:3)
I understand and accept that jobs that rely on someone simply following a process given down by management, without needing to apply judgement or on-the-spot thinking, is a piece of very low hanging fruit for automation. Baristas, fast food counter staff, checkout/till staff in supermarkets etc. are, as we already know, all going to find their jobs disappear in the near future.
However, many skilled jobs make use of IT systems for data analysis and calculations, where much of the setting up is still done by a squishy human on a PC in an office paid a high salary for their work and knowledge in using the system and explaining the results to clients. Many professional services firms are already automating much of the calculation and systems work to other countries, or to a computer.
Many first world governments are actually encouraging ways to make such work more standardised and easier to automate. The UK government's consultation into the way final salary pension schemes in the UK are valued every three years is one such example, although you have to really dig into the detail of the green paper to find it:
https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]
Many of these highly paid staff will see themselves as safe from automation, but their bosses certainly don't.
This is going to be a train wreck (Score:2)
Americans are against getting financial assistance or any other kind of "hand outs", so it will be interesting to see how we adapt to this.
I think it will be a mess, because we're not likely to plug the legal loop hole around robots. You don't have to pay wages to a robot, they don't pay income taxes, they don't spend their earnings in the local community, and the employer doesn't have to buy robots healthcare. The way public companies are legally required to operate in the interests of their shareholders (
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It's not a legal loop hole. It is the sensible way to do business. What is not sensible is the way we do social services. We waste a bunch of money on fraud determining who is eligible. If you simply give them away to everyone, then that gets a whole lot cheaper. Now you only have to verify citizenship.
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We waste a bunch of money on fraud determining who is eligible
You save a lot more, though. In one month, a single person could easily eliminate a dozen non-eligible people from the program, which would easily pay for the expenses.
My guess: Kindergarten workers will be hit by this (Score:2)
The knock-on effect of automation will make more people stay at home, reducing the need for services like kindergartens. Same goes for other businesses when people return to their homes and do more stuff themselves: Looking after their children, cooking more at home, gardening, cleaning and such.
Just guessing here, but if I'm right, this may not be all bad. Back to the fifties? ;)
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The kindergarten, valuable as it is, was just an example of possible knock-on effects. There's a social side to it, but also an economic. How to pay for a service when unemployed and with lots of free time and the skills to do it yourself.
PwC are a vested interest... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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In a world where no one works, and no one earns income - who is left to buy the output of the robots?
Capitalism driven production REQUIRES consumers with disposable income. The one cannot exist without the other. To save capitalism, you need to save the consumer.
Good point. Also, states need tax revenues, so they need someone or something to tax. Not much to tax if most people are out of work. AFAIK, there are no social modes suitable for the future we seem to be heading towards. This may get ugly.
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More Than They Predict (Score:2)
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The US pays wages that limit our ability to compete in world trade.
Not quite. China is becoming too expensive to manufacture because laborers there want higher wages for a middle-class lifestyle. Manufacturing is coming back to the US but the new factories are highly automated. When John Deere opened a new factory, they had 10,000+ applications for 800 jobs.
The non working will simply not quietly starve to death or live in want.
Or join the underground economy by doing odd jobs for cash. I had an uncle who ran a landscaping business for cash under the table, his family drew welfare benefits and never filed taxes in 30 years. Just because the jo
Not a concern (Score:2)
Do not fear robots! (Score:2)
I am not should be particularly worried because I do not fear losing their jobs to robots because I am higher-skilled workers. See, there is no need for people to fear Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots . ;)
You have that backwards (Score:2)
Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.
So why are the U.S. jobs more at risk? They seem to think what the tellers do is simpler than the "international finance" people.
But simpler does not mean more automatable. In theory bank tellers across the U.S. could have been replaced long ago by the ATM - but as we all know ATMS are everywhere and that has not happened.
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Automation was supposed to be the end of that kind of thing but it just led to higher end jobs.
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" [amzn.to] by Antonio Garcia Martinez, where he saw a trading desk at Goldman Sach went from 20 traders and two programmers to two traders and 20 programmers. That's when he bailed out on Wall Street to go to Silicon Valley to get into ad clicks.
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The great news there for us technical folk is that if 20 programmers are working today, you can be sure they will need 40 in a few years to clean up the mess the 20 left.
Maybe, maybe not. High Frequency Trading is losing its luster and might be on the way out.
http://www.investopedia.com/news/high-frequency-trading-flash-boys-losing-steam/ [investopedia.com]
Re:better to eliminate those financial jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it kill CNN (or slashdot for that matter) to include things like references, facts, and arguments to back up conclusions?
It would since those often don't exist.
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That's what I thought when I saw CNN also.
Singularity (Score:2)
AGI is not going to give us an infinite supply of workers. It'll give us an even larger supply of free-willed individuals. They're not going to be any more willing to do drudge work than humans are. Probably less.
LDNLS constructs, non-intelligent but highly capable, are the incoming infinite worker force. They're already present, and getting more sophisticated by the day. Rapidly.
The singularity has been relatively soft-edged; people don't realize they're in it yet. But they are.
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Sure. Just as soon as we manage to create AI. We have A; we most certainly don't have I. Yet.
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The surface of the Earth is finite and solar power is becoming cheap and effective for mobile robotics. In 50 years I will likely not be able to afford a place where I can still see the sky. If I can't afford even that small luxury, how can I afford to live in space where I'll have to pay for air?
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I don't know why you feel the need to remain constrained by current limitations when you have access to unlimited labor
You don't have unlimited labor. Someone else does. And they'll just take whatever they want. And if you have any complaints, please discuss it with the armed battle bot over there. Shoo shoo.
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Eminent domain is supposed to be a process to consolidate property for a purpose that serves the public good. It almost never works out that way. Usually a state or local government use the laws to rip people's homes away from them and hand it over to some special interest.
Indeed, I know I don't own my house or the land it sits on. Not only can someone file some paperwork and take it away from me. If I stopped paying my property tax for long enough, I would be removed and my house auctioned off. Private pro
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They don't get sick, take vacations, go on maternity leave, strike, ask for raises, or need benefits.
Robots required maintenance. If a robot goes out spec by the tiniest fraction that prevents it from functioning normally, someone is going to fix it. Robots fixing robots is quite a ways off in the future.