Slashdot Mirror
Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?
Anonymous writes "Marshall Brain (the guy who started HowStuffWorks) has published an article claiming that robots will take half the jobs in the U.S. by 2050. Some of his predictions: real computer vision systems by 2020, computers with the CPU power and memory of the human brain by 2040, completely robotic fast food restaurants in 2030 (which then unemploy 3.5 million people), etc. It's a pretty astounding article. My question: How many people on /. think he is right (or even close - let's say he's off by 10 or 20 years)? Or is he full of it?"
This article is absolutely rediculous. How do you make a connection between a kiosk where you can order food at McDonalds and robots taking over every job in the United States? First of all, I don't think a fast food resteraunt could be completely automated. Machines are good at things like accounting, but when it comes to human interaction there is a lot of room for improvement.
Autonomous humanoid robots will take disruption to a whole new level. Once fully-autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robots are as easy to buy as an automobile, most people in the economy will not be able to make the labor = money trade anymore. They will have no way to earn money, and that means they end up homeless and on welfare.
This is horseshit. First of all it is impossible, if most people in the economy were on welfare they would be no economy. Where would these companies get money to build and maintain the robots? I don't disagree that there will probably be a lot of automated systems in the near future, but this article is just stupid.
Visualize the world of wine
is to make forward-looking predictions which are
justified with little more than hand-waiving
arguments, and the other to look at past
history and see what type of hand-waiving
arguments of days gone by have actually come
to fruition.
The author touches on the issue, but IMO is
comparing apples to oranges in this quote:
Rather than talk about airplanes, let's talk
about robotics since that's the subject of the
article. Off the top of my head, the
industries in which robots have dominated
more than any other are in chip fabs and
automobile assembly lines, and this has been
the case for over a decade. Are we seeing
the type of doomsday scenario for the
workforce that this article implies?
Just because the technology is there does not mean people will want to use it.
More importantly, no matter how much technology we have, we'll always find ways to keep ourselves more occupied with other matters through the USE of the technologies we create. The Matrix is certainly a very fun, very cool movie, but the distopian future of self-aware machines displacing humanity just isn't reality. Yes, I would rather have a robot properly preparing my cheap Wendy's cheeseburger over waiting 5 minutes for some high school kid to get done spitting on it, rubbing it on the floor, and then carelessly handing it to me through the drive-through window. However, when that kid gets displaced by some robot, I'm sure he'll find some other means to buy himself that rice-burner.
Look at history people. The only time a civilization or humanity has been "displaced" has been because the people self-destructed, not because of their inventions, mechanical creations, or otherwise. Now ruining a natural habitat, or creating "gods" to sacrifice themselves to, yes, that has a negative impact, but those aren't technological innovations.
Will the "supply siders" never give up. We now see that we have passed the "Curve" on almost all industries where the number of persons required is dropping. The supposed robot maker jobs here is already automated. The electronics Industry is so automated that the total world supply of CPU's is made by less than a thousand persons and that number drops every day!
We may or may not reach the points in the time suggested but the real issue is what are we going to do with the people and how are we going to allocate the resources.
I moved to Alabama in 1963. There were over a million jobs in the state picking cotton. With the advent of cotton pickers, this number dropped to an insignificant sum of a two or three thousand. There were a significant number of new jobs which arose that replaced some of the lost jobs but even as early as the 1960's and 1970's this was a real problem.
The failed concept here is that every person is somehow able to adapt "Instantly" to the new reality. People who are young do so fairly well so long as they are pretty bright and industrious. Many others particularly as they grow older have increasing difficulty adapting. Careers which once lasted a lifetime now last but a year or two. The Economic Concepts of the "Free Traders" and such simply do not factore in any concept of time or adaptablity factors.
The solution was to build lots of "Projects" where these people live and their progeny to this day. They fill every town in the state. Their cost is dramatically higher than paying these people to work would be. It is on the order of 4 to 5 times as expensive as a fairly decent job!
We need to quit arguing about the supposed supply of new jobs which about 5 years ago the curve of job loss as a net crossed the curve of new jobs that can be supplied. Now even if we recover economically the jobs don't return.
Those who point to jobs going off shore as a job increase don't notice that world wide there is a massive glut of labor. The issue here is pretty deep because if we continue with the stupid "Supply Side" economic ideals as a religious belief that it is, we will do very great damage before we face reality and fix things as they need to be.
I am not suggesting that there are not many routes to solution here, but the confidence that somehow people will need more and more labor as we automate is the triumph of belief over reality
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.