Slashdot Mirror
Smart Systems Threaten More Jobs Than Outsourcing
fbform writes "A strategy consulting firm called Strategy Analytics has announced that outsourcing to India and other countries is a small threat compared to having IT jobs replaced by 'smart systems'. Quote from a different news-source: 'higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities'." Such as this one.
Great. And who will keep these clever systems up and running 24h * 365days? And who will troubleshoot it when it malfunctions?
The more complicated the systems are the more people are needed to keep it running.
It is not a problem that repetitive tasks are being done by a computer. That's what they're for.
In other news, factory robots are a bigger threat than outsourcing. Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic.
The article may be right about call centre jobs; there are some applications where machines do as good a job as people - though this is not true in customer service applications. A good example is the app British Airways uses for flight information - you tell it the destination and approximate time, and it tells you whether the flight is on time - and it works incredibly well. However, this is not a "customer service" application - if you are phoning up with a complex problem, no computer on earth will be able to help you.
From the perspective of the IT worker, I think that the impact on them will only be beneficial - if intelligent machines can be made to work, then they will be based on intelligent software, which someone has to write/maintain.
As an aside, I remember seeing a presentation from Oracle in about 1994-5 about clever automated database tuning technology, and that all those expensive DBAs would be a thing of the past. When I was at work last week, they were all still there, working damn hard too...
From the article:
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm for the U.S. military, is leading a project to develop a vehicle that can navigate a desert for at least 10 miles without a driver. Prototypes have gone as far as seven miles, successfully moving around cactuses, boulders and other obstacles.
Wow! These guys are right, my job is on the line. DARPA's "10 mile desert navigator" (isn't it 100?) got a whole 7 miles. So now the ONLY OBVIOUS conclusion that I'm going to be out of a job??? Geez, this author sure does seem stupid.
What a trashy article. If it's not fit for publication, why is it fit for Slashdot? Oh yeah, this is Slashdot, where we talk about articles that really aren't fit for publication....
It may not come in our lifetime, or not before we retire, but software creation and maintenance will be fully automated.
But think about the benefits: you can't get a job as a steam engine valve operator anymore, but you can afford a car. Every job that's lost to automation is one more job that people can get done for them at a lower cost.
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What you fail to see is that maintenancing a new machine that does some task is almost always more intellectually demanding than the original task. Also, it will never require as much manpower to repair the machines as it would have required to do the task without them. So if ten people are dispensing drinks to customers at some commercial location, and those ten workers are replaced by vending machines, you still need a vending machine repair person, but you don't need _ten_. Also, that person will require some increase in intellectual ability over the average seller of soft drinks, because fixing the machine is simply more complicated a task. Admittedly in this example the cognitive threshold is very low, but where you might be able to hire a borderline retard to sell drinks, you can't hire one to fix vending machines.
Let me put it this way: If the company's implementation of the machine doesn't put people out of work, why are they implementing it? If I'm already paying ten people to do a job, why should I buy a fancy robot and then still be paying ten people to go around fixing it? You can be certain that as machines replace jobs the number of human workers will go down, and the ones that are left will be the ones smart enough to be able to do things that machines can't.