If Robots Steal So Many Jobs, Why Aren't They Saving Us Now? (wired.com) 131
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. [...] This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We've been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. San Francisco has even considered a tax on robots -- replace a human with a machine, and pay a price. The problem will get so bad, argue folks like former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, we'll need a universal basic income to support our displaced human workers.
Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You're more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. Moving from typewriters to word processors made workers more efficient. Increasingly sophisticated and sensitive robotic arms can now work side-by-side on assembly lines with people without flinging our puny bodies across the room, doing the heavy lifting and leaving the fine manipulation of parts to us. The machines have their strengths -- literally in this case -- and the humans have theirs. While robots can do the labor we don't want to do or can't do, such as lifting car doors on an assembly line, they're not very good at problem-solving. "Think about how you would pick up a piece of paper that's lying flat on a table. You can't grip it like you would an apple -- you have to either pinch it to get it to lift off the surface, or drag it to hang over the edge of the table," writes Matt Simon via Wired. "As a kid, you learn to do that through trial and error, whereas you'd have to program a robot with explicit instructions to do the same."
In closing, Simon writes: "Overestimating robots and AI underestimates the very people who can save us from this pandemic: Doctors, nurses, and other health workers, who will likely never be replaced by machines outright. They're just too beautifully human for that."
Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You're more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. Moving from typewriters to word processors made workers more efficient. Increasingly sophisticated and sensitive robotic arms can now work side-by-side on assembly lines with people without flinging our puny bodies across the room, doing the heavy lifting and leaving the fine manipulation of parts to us. The machines have their strengths -- literally in this case -- and the humans have theirs. While robots can do the labor we don't want to do or can't do, such as lifting car doors on an assembly line, they're not very good at problem-solving. "Think about how you would pick up a piece of paper that's lying flat on a table. You can't grip it like you would an apple -- you have to either pinch it to get it to lift off the surface, or drag it to hang over the edge of the table," writes Matt Simon via Wired. "As a kid, you learn to do that through trial and error, whereas you'd have to program a robot with explicit instructions to do the same."
In closing, Simon writes: "Overestimating robots and AI underestimates the very people who can save us from this pandemic: Doctors, nurses, and other health workers, who will likely never be replaced by machines outright. They're just too beautifully human for that."
we need single payer healthcare or unlink it from (Score:5, Insightful)
we need single payer healthcare or unlink it from jobs.
Re:we need single payer healthcare or unlink it fr (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be un-linked by law. Employer provided health coverage is one of the many examples of how businesses circumvent problems created by your government. When the US government passed Stabilization Act of 1942 employers could not change wages. They still needed to attract talent so they started offering benefits like healthy care to employees. Sounds great right? Wrong!
What it did was create a perverse incentive for Major Health Insurance companies to start shopping big business entirely cutting the consumer out of the discussion. Now that the cost of healthcare and free-market consumer controls are missing from the landscape cost of healthcare ballooned into what you see now.
Employers with religious ideas blocked workers from getting some benefits. People that hated their insurance plans had to either quit their jobs to work for someone who did have ones that fit their lifestyle or pay through the nose in the healthcare ripoff market. Insurance companies now interfere with your treatment options because... money. Medicines you need are not on their formularies because they own stock in a different company that makes a similar but less effective drug for your condition.
You see... but people like it this way. They like their choices being made for them. They like having people fuck them over so they can bitch about the choices they are given. But when they finally have a choice... when they can finally vote for a candidate that can change something... they ignore that candidate and then claim they don't have a choice and continue the status quo. And every time you remind them of their small but still responsible part in how shitty things are... they hate you most for it. Truth never mattered... just don't you dare ever point out that they share some blame in how things turned out. That is the greatest evil of all in the USA... expecting people to accept blame for their mistakes, failures, or lies.
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That's only part of the story. The Stabilization Act is no longer in effect, but employee health plans are exempt from taxation (unlike regular wages). Tax medical benefits and BAM problem goes away quickly. As an added bonus, mandate that employees should be able to take their share of whatever is paid yearly into the employee plan by the employer as wage instead. As it stands, employees without many medical problems wind up effectively subsidizing their coworkers who do require medical attention (or w
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Agreed. Add price transparency to that one small modification and medical expenditures will start a steady decline.
Don't be a sheep who calls for single-payer (Score:2)
Now that the cost of healthcare and free-market consumer controls are missing from the landscape cost of healthcare ballooned into what you see now.
Indeed, but there is one medical procedure for which consumers do shop around for the best value. The benefit to consumers, resulting from competition, has been astounding, as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
How about extending that success story to many other areas?
Single-payer would drive healthcare prices much higher because there would be NO competition. There would be NO alternatives to flee to if we don't like the coverage provided by that single government-run system. (As
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Yeah, we got sick before we could train them, or train them to collect benefits after we trained them to pretend to be sick.
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south korea is doing real well.
Re: we need single payer healthcare or unlink it f (Score:4)
south korea is doing real well.
Italy could have learned a lot from South Korea: Widely available testing, including drive-thru testing; Lots of labs to process the samples; An app that shows where people with COVID-19 have been; Social distancing; Early detection; The needed safety and medical equipment; Face masks are worn by most everyone everywhere; And their government and health officials are being honest about the situation.
Were Italy's hygiene and safety protocols so inadequate, their medical facilities became infection zones? Was it because Italy did not have the equipment and safeguards to keep the medical staff safe, they became infected and, in turn, infected their patients, which led to other people becoming infected, and so forth and so on, bringing them to the disaster they're in now? I don't know. That's just what the news oozing from my TV tells me.
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It didn't help that the Mayor of Florence tweeted a "Hug a Chinese" message to Italians on Feb 1, and they responded in force. Like many liberal politicians, his heart was in the right place but his policy solution was stupid and dangerous.
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Italy is what you get if you elect populists. Sooner or later (usually sooner) something like this happens and they are out of their depth, cut all the stuff they thought wasn't necessary because they were so short sighted, and you suffer the consequences of your stupidity.
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You are completely misrepresenting what is happening in Italy. Nobody is being refused treatment for financial reasons.
Maybe in the US, the people with the most money will get priority access to the ventilators.
Some - not all - hospitals in Italy are so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that they are unable to provide ventilators to older patients, because if they did it would mean that younger patients with respiratory patients would die.
If COVID-19 were to scale up this badly in the US, doctors there wou
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Did you see the morons in Fla and Ca that were on the beaches? Very likely they will be in hospitals.
Right now, I have a 34 y.o. cousin that is moving between home/hospital with this. She did not take it serious and even when the elephant started stomping on her chest, she still had friends deliver goodies INSIDE the house. It was only once she was having a near cardiac attack, that her friends started delivering goodies on the porch.
And she is one of the lucky ones. i think(hope?) tha
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Best wishes to you and your cousin. Good luck.
Re: we need single payer healthcare or unlink it (Score:2)
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Yes, so let's wait 2 weeks and see who gets access to ventilators in the US in the event of a shortage of resources.
We both know that in the event of a shortage of ventilators in the US, the rich would get world-class healthcare, while the poor would get ......
I genuinely hope that things do not get that bad in the US, and I hope you and your family remain safe through this crisis.
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Whether or not the rich gain access is really not the point. Don't think a socialized medicine system would actually provide MORE care. Italy shows you it does not. And it is absolutely for reasons of economy.
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And why are they not making them? Why didn't they have more ventilators in the first place? You're completely missing the point.
If a government-run, single-payer system can't get provide enough care for its citizens, it is absolutely for reasons of economy. The single-payer system didn't want to lay out the cash for more ICU beds with ventilators before there was a crisis, and they can't pivot now.
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The "for profit" American system might be able to pivot. Or it might not. But do not think for an instant that Italy's current crisis is only due to them "not anticipating the increased demand". It is interesting to juxtapose these two situations to China.
Italy's system simply did not want to fund more ICU beds/ventilators. So they took at guess at what they would need, looked at the available resources, and provided what they could. It was not enough.
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Well the thing is, we always fund a certain number of empty beds and other unutilized medical equipment. How much money people pump into the system and how often the system is pushed to its limits determines how much extra capacity we fund.
China's solution seems to have been to point a gun at people's heads and make them build out the infrastructure to care for people in the outbreak. Note that it "seems" to have been their solution. We don't really know all of what went on there, nor do we know what kin
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Re: we need single payer healthcare or unlink it f (Score:5, Informative)
When the hospital is full and out of supplies, people will be refused treatment, or get minimal treatment. Wait a couple of weeks
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Sadly, you're likely to be more right then me.
Single-payer Italy reached triage conditions (Score:2)
When the hospital is full and out of supplies, people will be refused treatment, or get minimal treatment. Wait a couple of weeks
That's pretty much the definition of triage. And it started in single-payer Italy a few days ago: Patients above age 60 lose access to respirators [express.co.uk]
Dream on (Score:5, Informative)
"Doctors, nurses, and other health workers, who will likely never be replaced by machines outright. "
Thousands of gastroenterologists who operated on hundreds of thousands of stomach ulcers were replaced by a handful of pills once a student found out that ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori, didn't even need a robot for that.
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The pills are probably largely manufactured by robots. So in a way robots are replacing people.
Re:Dream on (Score:5, Insightful)
Also most of eye surgery, which is being done with lasers and other high precision systems.
Ventilators are robots. (Score:5, Insightful)
Other people can't breath for you. Most people give up on the effort to breath for another person within minutes, or with mechanical assistance after an hour or so, but a ventilator just keeps going, helping you at your most vulnerable, if you get pneumonia...
The problem is that there's not enough robots like that to save everyone.
GrpA
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Bit of an exaggeration calling a ventilator a robot. Simple, gas-operated ventilators (such as the Vortran GO2VENT) would hardly be confused for a robot. (It's more like clockwork mechanisms.)
You Google broken again? (Score:5, Informative)
Overall, roughly 1,500 U.S. hospitals have installed the da Vinci Surgical System since it came to market in 2000, according to Modern Healthcare.
And then there are : ... ... ... ...
The Xenex Germ-Zapping Robot.
The PARO Therapeutic Robot.
The CyberKnife.
The TUG.
And the thousands of robots who distribute meals, medication, drinks ...
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Yeah, about those Da Vinci robotic surgery machines and socialized medicine.
Prostate cancer in 2008. Had the Da Vinci assisted surgery on Tuesday, went to the movies on Friday. Very advanced machine allowing very rapid recovery.
The socialized medicine? There was a website about the doctors trained on the machine. I found that my state of Virginia had 88 doctors that were trained on the use of the Da Vinci machine. I also found that the entire country of Canada, and their socialized medicine, had 60
Way to disprove an arugment nobody made! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Came here to say exactly this. Their whole premise is a straw man. The concern wasn’t that robots have take all the jobs already. The concern was that robots could and likely will take jobs if the current financial incentives are allowed to continue on their current trajectory unabated.
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TFA is absolutely retarded crap by some clickbaiting fuckstick, and promoted by angsty Slashdotters afraid of becoming obsolete. The journalistic quality of it is non-existent.
"Hotels and restaurants and airlines have taken massive hits; Delta has cut its flight capacity by 70 percent. One in five US households has already lost work. And that’s all because of the vulnerabilities of the human worker. When we get sick—or we have to shelter in place to avoid getting sick—the work that depends
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and don't generally fly on airplanes
Go on...
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Every generation or so. People get up and arms about how technology will kill everyone's jobs.
1880's The cotton gin was supposed to reduce the need for labor (mostly slaves) however it just created more output thus they needed more labor.
1900's A generation later Water and Coal Mills were supposed to automate everyone's jobs.
1920's Then the Internal Combustion Engine
1960's (WWII put a generation on delaying on technology panic) Computers (Thinking Machines)
1980's Robots (Automotive is dead with those robot
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I wonder how many of the jobs lost during this economic downtown will come back functioning in the same way when we start to recover.
It's relatively hard to take a business made for humans to work in with tools made for humans with a layout made for humans with processes made for humans and start to automate parts of that. It's a lot easier to start a business from the bottom based on automating everything. It's the difference between making a hamburger flipper [abcnews.com] and a hamburger machine [techcrunch.com].
If I were starting a n
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Exactly! Right now automation is replacing simple, repetitive, mindless jobs. Would you expect the people displaced by these robots to be much help? Of course not, so why should the "robots" replacing these people be expected to be much help.
Also consider that using these robots is helping as they will not be infected by SARS-CoV-2 or spread it as efficiently as people do. So, they are helping a bit.
That's what the machines want you to think (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity.
Actually Skynet was the one who created and released the COVID-19 virus. In 6 months the Terminators will start hunting the survivors.
After 6 movies and a television show I guess it figured out that while nukes are much more visually appealing, a virus is more efficient.
And there's more (Score:3)
Who's doing the testing do you think?
"The lab is processing about 100 coronavirus tests a day. But it's prepared to do more than 1,000 a day immediately and could quickly increase that to 4,000, Jerome says.
The demand for tests is rising. Seattle is at the center of a coronavirus outbreak that has already claimed the lives of 10 people in Washington state.
One reason the lab is ready to test lots of people is its state-of-the-art equipment, including twin devices that extract genetic material from specimens.
"That all happens ROBOTICALLY," Jerome says, as he gives me a tour of the lab's testing area. "
https://www.npr.org/sections/h... [npr.org]
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The test for coronavirus is essentially a DNA test. The first DNA sequencing was incredibly labour intensive. Sequencing the human genome using the original process was estimated to take decades, and cost billions.
Now it costs about $40. People are talking about being able to build the next generation of sequencers into cell phones.
Wat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Venture capital rewards stupidity not innovation (Score:2)
Add an extra sauce of marketing and we're just wasting time and money on anything that does not matter.
Take a look at Zume's early promotion videos all taking about AI and automation for something as simple as making a pizza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
They might just as well have burned all those millions in VC funding to bake their pizza's.
Same story for WeWork, Uber, Yelp.
They add nothing to the progress of society.
They are all simple ideas bloated by the stupidity and greed of investors.
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That seems to be a pretty broad statement that probably doesn't hold up given a little scrutiny. Some invest in stupid ideas, some invest in genuinely innovative ideas. But the market itself doesn't care about "innovation"—a term so abstract it makes your argument even more difficult. Some of those stupid ideas the market has demonstrated to be viable businesses, while some of them not.
I also question this notion you mention of the "progress of society." Whether society is making progress or not reall
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I will say that Zume has some of the worst infrastructure engineers I've ever met.
They have the same problem (Score:5, Funny)
And by the time Robots completely replace doctors (Score:2)
They will also have completely replaced all of the patients.
(Not actually a joke. Go forward 100 years and it will be difficult to see why robots would want humans around.)
Strawman Article Anyone? (Score:2)
I thought a large part of that debate was that a job that used to take 100 people now takes 1.
None of the WIRED readers I know ever thought that people were sitting around doing nothing because of robots. All the people I know that do nothing readily admit it has nothing to do with robots.
I'm going to file this under Caronavirus Clickbait.
--
Art will never be able to exist without nature. - Pierre Bonnard
No need for General AI for robots to take our job. (Score:2)
Re:No need for General AI for robots to take our j (Score:4, Informative)
A typical physician, even a non-specialist, does mostly a few things. The majority of an average GPs job is telling people they have a cold, or to lose weight (usually both). Sure, they do lots of other things too, but if you have a robot to handle the colds then you don't need half of them. Specialists are, of course, even more specialized. Many surgeons specialize in a single surgery.
The same holds for the rest of us. You probably do lots of things at your job. But *most* of your time (working time, that is; most workers don't actually spend most of their time working) is probably spent doing a small set of tasks that are ripe for automation, even without AI.
Typical bull, typical idiot posturing (Score:2, Insightful)
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People seem to have a tendency to view current limitations as permanent limitations. Perhaps it's because we don't want to feel like what we're doing right now is futile, or that the rules we believe govern the word (in this case, economic) are static and dependable.
The idea that robots may displace a significant enough portion of the workforce that we will have to completely change our system of distributive justice is a scary thought. It's probably easier for most to just deny that it's a real possibility
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In the 1970s, chess players said, chess requires real intelligence. No computer could ever think like a human.
I don't remember anyone saying that. Who are you quoting? You aren't making things up, are you?
What a stupid question (Score:2)
The robots won't save us because a) they don't take over the jobs all at once, and b) they are owned by corporations and not by The People so they exist to produce profit, not to improve the lives of The People. Not to mention c) not all of the jobs they can do so far are essential. In fact, most of them aren't.
Ever see Terminator? (Score:3)
*sigh*.. 'Robots' can't *THINK* (Score:4, Insightful)
'Robots' are not taking peoples' jobs. Get over it.
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Gee, you're so repetitive we could replace you with a robot. Or maybe someone already did?
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If she claimed to be my wife there's no reason to believe whatever else she said.
Hope you wrapped little Rickky.
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For some, one line suffices:
RUN Rincewind
For the love of pete, don't support "AI rights" (Score:2)
The crapware they keep trotting out called 'AI' cannot THINK, has no cogntive capacity
Quite correct; AI only gives the illusion of intelligence, and yet, there are touchy-feel people calling for AIs to have "rights."
This devalues genuine human rights. They really haven't thought it through. As machine learning processes become more sophisticated, there will come an arbitrary point at which if I kill -9 one of them, the AI rights wackos would have me charged with murder.
I could see Russia releasing a worm that spawns trillions of such processes, sucking much of the grid's capacity to genera
Fallacies (Score:2)
> typewriters
Reduced how many secretaries were needed, remember entire rooms of typers? Now all replaced with one individual.
> robotic arms
Reduced how many assembly line workers were needed, now just one oversees multiple arms/machines.
Of course there will still need to be decisions made, but even decisions (who gets targeted for police intervention and which neighborhoods get policed is being decided by AI). More and more "human" judgements are being outsourced to tech. That doesn't mean there isn
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Except that they've not been replaced with one individual. Paperwork has multiplied by an _enormous_ factor.
We didn't build them all yet. (Score:3)
Honestly, what a silly question. I mean, yes, it's a little more complicated than that; we don't know how to make them good enough at ANY job for them to be worth building for many jobs. But there is no theoretical ceiling to that kind of progress. It's GOING to be a thing someday, and at some point "we'll invent new jobs" is, at best, something we'll have to have a robot do. And I don't think anyone wants robots to invent jobs for us, so... problem.
Because our economy is a house of cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if we had some mechanism to get money into their hands so they could buy food and pay rent but we don't, and 40+ years of non-stop neo-liberalism in our media means that nobody's terribly eager or willing to build those mechanism.
So instead of letting a few million folk take a 3 month paid vacation we're gonna bring everything to it's knees. The rich will buy it all up at cut rate prices and we can at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that at least we're not funding the irresponsible lifestyles of others. I mean except all those trust fund babies and billionaire who won the lottery in life.
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Are you going to say anything about actual automation, or are you just going to complain about the government not having enough power?
Did Xi Xinping win life's lottery, too? Hmm, I wonder.
My point is automation (Score:4, Insightful)
The economy isn't shutting down for technical or biological reasons. It's shutting down for social ones. We can't bare the thought of somebody having food and shelter and not having to go to work. Not when we get up everyday and go to a job we hate. But that's realistically that's the only solution.
This is a problem that can only be solved by society at large. Robots and science aren't going to save us. Not at this point anyway. Maybe in 6-8 months when we have a vaccine.
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Well, I would say those are manifestations of the general point he was expressing.
It would be nice if society could say 'ok, you are going to have a 3 month pause to mitigate this problem, and you'll be able to have basic needs met, even if some goods and services aren't as available for a while' without inducing crises among the workers.
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To a great extent, that's already happening.
Landlords are being prohibited from throwing out tenants. Utilities are offering to stop disconnects. The Feds are running up $2 trillion in debt to . . . do something. Maybe not the right thing. We'll see. It may not last for three months, but don't think people are being thrown to the wolves. The long-term consequences may not be good, though.
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So what are YOU doing to help people that you know who have lost their jobs? Since you have such largess that you can afford to do so, right?
Or is your entire point that you want someone else to foot the bill, and you want the government's heavy hand to be the one that enforces that decision?
The three-month paid vacation (Score:2)
instead of letting a few million folk take a 3 month paid vacation
rsilvergun, how many people are you, personally, going to pay while they're on this three-month vacation?
Some employers can afford to do that -- and those that can afford to do that largely are doing that, because it's in their own interest to retain their knowledgeable workforce, which will be greatly needed when the pandemic is over.
But many, especially small businesses that were marginally profitable in the first place, can't afford to do that.
Rather than putting 100% of the burdens of the pandemic on em
Wrong question. (Score:2)
First, they don't "steal" jobs, anymore than copyright infringement is "stealing."
Second, what value were you adding, if your job can be replaced by a simple machine, neo-Luddite?
Third, if "saving us now" is a simple matter of effort, where are all those college grads who want everyone else to pay off their loans? Don't answer if your major was underwater basket weaving or kinesiology (current major of choice for sponsored football players).
This has got to be... (Score:2)
How did this get promoted to a story if not by robots? They want to hide their influence, don't you know.
But seriously, you know how there were a number of people that could do the math early on, and they saw the impact that the virus was going to have, and everyone else was like: "What, you're crazy, there's only 600 infected in the country!"
Right, 600 people after 9 weeks. Guess what it will be after 18 weeks? 1,200? Guess again. Try 270,000.
The same type
the ONLY thing robots are going to save is (Score:2)
1970-2020 (Score:2)
Want more? Invest in robot design to work out what can be done.
Did not do that? The robot work that was possible will be done by skilled and low skilled humans.
Invest over decades for the robots you want. Did not do that? Dont expect robots to be ready in 2020...
Fuck you Data! (Score:2)
Ask the Elevatorman, or the Ferrier, or the... (Score:2)
Robots aren't saving us now because . . . (Score:2)
they aren't ready yet. Had this disease hit in 2030 or so things would have been very different. Look at the kind of jobs that are laying people off due to social-distancing mandates:
Restaurant waiters/waitresses
Movie employees
Store clerks
Hotel staff
etc.
Wages haven't gotten high enough in much of the West to make automating those jobs economically feasible in 2020. Had the 1970s not happened and had the buying power of "unskilled" labor not cratered due to massive inflation, yeah, you could expect a lot
jfc are we facebook now? (Score:2)
This is the kind of pure, unadulterated crazy that gets reposted on Facebook by old women at knitting clubs. "Hey Dorothy, you know AIs are going to be knitting these socks soon." "Agatha, that's just horse pucky, if they could do that they'd be saving us from the china virus."
Robots don't steal jobs (Score:2)
Management does.
"Robots taking jobs" is a false narrative designed to deflect blame away from corporations, who hate having employees.
just brace yourself.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Transform society.. (Score:2)
It's not a technical challenge. With automation and robotisation we can produce more than enough for everyone. With most people working remotely, the problem is with the occupations that cannot be done remotely, like in working bars and restaurants, construction etc.
If we exclude work like in bars in restaurants, the work that still needs to be done manually can be done safer by i.e. working in cells of people. That means working with the same people and have a lot less rotation. When someone gets sick, imm
Maybe they are saving us? (Score:3)
Despite so many people sitting things out, our supply chain for essentials seems to still be largely present, with stock devastated by hoarding panic rather than shipments not coming in.
Yes, in large part because a lot of people are still in there, but they are able to continue despite so many people being idled with the help of machines. Once upon a time all our economy could manage was the essentials. Now we have a lot of stuff that is totally optional and that is where much of the economy is.
Robot are saving our butts! (Score:2)
This article is incredibly myopic on a number of levels.
Firstly and most importantly, robots are saving our butts right now. Why are there no serious concerns about a famine? Because automation has made farming such a low-human-density job that we can produce the food we need without the virus ripping through our farmers and/or contaminating our food supplies.
In fact, this is true for more or less any essential industry. Electricity and water aren't in real danger. Why? Because they're automated! The few pe
Will get... (Score:2)
Will get, not is already so bad. Automation (which is generally software and not just robotics in factories) is a a serious issue whether it is AI or just an ever growing an complex set of automation scripts which combined replace the need for people.
The real issue here isn't factory labor, the biggest issue is that knowledge workers the largest employment sector are being displaced alongside management (who are simpler to replace, just as well paid, and yet are proving somehow more resistant to replacement
Logical fallacies (Score:2)
There are still jobs that haven't been replaced by machines. Therefore, jobs aren't really being replaced by machines at all?
If a job hasn't yet been automated away, that proves it never will be?
Those seriously are the arguments he's making.
Robots Can Produce, Not Consume (Score:2)
The robots, once a problem is solved and reduced to specific steps, produce very efficiently. That's great. But why are they producing in the first place? For human consumption. The humans need to have a way to pay (from their own resources or others) for the robot-produced or -facilitated products or services. No humans (physically or logically), no need for robots. The singularity has not yet happened.
Y'all got it backwards (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
There is no reason why a lot of lawyers couldn't be replaced by AI. There's people currently sitting on Death Row who probably would have been better off defending themselves with the assistance of some kind of legal program instead of relying on the appallingly incompetent lawyers who represented them.