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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.
Considering the fact that Computers have more sickies then people I think we're safe for the time being.
Trying to stop technological processes in the pursuit of extra jobs is pointless, because it will hold back the economy in general. Would we be better you think haveing a blacksmith make car parts by hand in his small workshop, or can we do things better with a robot with ±0.01mm tolerance.
Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
"I view this in the same way as the first flight of the Wright brothers," Cohen said.
Such advancements eventually find there way into businesses, which means someday fewer jobs driving forklifts and delivery trucks.
Does this mean that the writer believes that air travel is a bad thing? Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
My first civilian job, I worked with a tech writer
who would make technical illustrations by *manually*
deleting centerlines and such from AutoCAD drawings
before exporting the images. Said it was great
mindless work to rest his brain.
When I showed him how to turn off layers, his eyes
got huge. "Don't tell anybody that! We'll lose our
overtime!"
The fight over technology vs. jobs has been playing out for 300+ years, since the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 1800's.
Joseph Marie Jacquard's invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labor, would deprive them of their livelihood. However, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France. The loom was declared public property in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.
Here's another example:
Our city currently has a shortage of 300+ tax drivers particularly during graveyard shifts. The taxi drivers union has proposed that cabs could be fitted with GPS and route-planning software, but the council refuses saying that any potential taxi drivers must pass the official exams (demonstrating their ability to have memorised "The Knowledge").
Introducing technology would create more jobs, and there is no danger of loss of earnings, since the council regulates the fares that taxis can charge.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
PCs in the workplace are what Robery Cringley (I, Cringley) calls the IT dept full employment act. At my own workplace where PC techs outneumber macs techs 20:1 even though the number of macs to PCs is closer to 1:5, they once tried to force everyone to adopt a common platform and guess which one they voted on?
My mac does have sick days occasionally, but I dont envy PC users. My Linux computers are all just servers. So they really dont get much stress from constantly installing applications or doing thinks that cause them to red-line their disk usage. Thus they are as solid as a rock and never go down (same is true of my g4 mac servers). However they do get out of date on their patches and I truly worry about all the services I might have turned on that I dont know about. I'm not a good enough sys admin to trust myself to know if say Apache needs certain port maping and RPC sevices so I cant just go turning everything off. My solution is to firewall them and get a better sys admin to stay on top of the needed patches.
while my macs also have some "extra" srevices turned on I'm reasonably assured they were designed in a coherent fashion. When I turn on off a service the firewall automaticall closes those ports too. Since mac packages dont (normally) spray install files all over your system into places like /etc /usr/ /opt /bin and /sbin it makes removing things really easy and prevents cruft build up. (this by the way is why I will not install that loathsome gnu-darwin package: it for example even replaces /bin/make !!!)
Maybe this is what they meant about smart systems replacing IT techs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
"Unemployment is a benefit of any technologically advanced society." (?Robert Anton Wilson)
The sooner we realise that, and stop treating it as a problem, the better.
I'm not sure that distinction really exists
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
But even the life of the have-nots will be better. The poorest beggar in the world today is safe from smallpox, which even the richest people died from in the past. And even a refrigerator box is better than whatever shelter a beggar could get a hundred years ago.
Do we become a socialist welfare state
Something like that. What made communism inviable was the fact that wealth is finite. When productivity increases enough, people start giving things away. We get "free" email accounts with 100Mb capacity because the investment per account is just $0.10. Food productivity is so high that the goverment must buy and stock some farming products to raise the price.
The future I see is one where few things will be valuable. Real estate is one of them. Corporations are trying to raise the value of intellectual property, but I think it's obvious they will fail in the long run. For a while, arts and sports will be valuable skills, until art becomes fully automated and anyone can become a super-athlete, thanks to medical progress. In the end, we will either have the ultimate communist state, where wealth is distributed evenly by law, or we will the ultimate feudalist state, where the only wealth is owning land, acquired by inheritance. But the poorest serf will have a much better standard of living than any of us has today.