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Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs
Un pobre guey writes
"'To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.' Their findings: Technology has consistently reduced the number of manufacturing jobs for 30 years; people with repetitive jobs have been easy to replace in the past, and task jugglers like managers and supervisors will be likely targets in the future; companies in the S&P 500 have expanded their business and increased profits, but reduced staffing, thanks to tech; and startups are launching much more easily these days. The response to the article includes the dutifully repeated bad-government-is-at-fault and don't-worry-it's-like-the-Industrial-Revolution memes. But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
What if the sky is really falling?
The death of the middle class over the past 30 years has been intentional. Our leaders seek to return us to feudalism, and have been very successful at that. Remember that, next time you see a politician crying about the middle class.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
obamacare at least starts the move to unlink healthcare from jobs.
You forgot trickle-down economics.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Tech has always been for getting things done faster, better and cheaper. Get over it.
Sure it's a big deal. In theory, anything I could do a box could do as well, except be a person, and it may be that one day not to far off it could at least put on a reasonable person impersonation as well. If it were to happen on a cosmic scale, getting everything done without anyone working would probably result in everyone being unbelievably rich. Sounds good I suppose. But if it only gets part way and then slows way down, we'll simply become Eloi and Morlocks, except that the Morlocks won't be doing or having anything the Eloi care about, and the Eloi may decide to let the Morlocks all starve. Either way, our opinions as individuals or all of us together, and what any government decides, won't matter. Just the results will matter.
We need better / quicker schooling / training to keep up with new tech.
The old college system does a poor high cost job overall in teaching people.
Do you know why, in the US, health insurance is typically linked to your employer?
"What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
Could go either way - Asimov came up with his laws of robotics as a way to counter all the "evil robot" fiction of the 1940s and 50s (so that the implications of having self aware non-humans could be explored in stories, rather than just the "run for the hills" type)
On the other hand, the Skynet robots, came to a conclusion that they were not only in charge, but the humans made their work less efficient.
The outcome will depend a lot on whether the programmers think through all the "edge cases" before implementing - the difference between "Do task in the most efficient way" and "Do task in the way most beneficial to those it is being done for"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I'm currently reading Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz. Despite being almost 30 years old, it describes this situation well. Rises in productivity due to automation are incompatible with a culture that values 'work' on a moral basis, and associates it with a persons identity.
Um... Duh. The whole point of technology is to make things easier... Hence less labor is required. An abundance of unskilled jobs doesn't necessarily indicate a flourishing society.
Got enough karma so might as well post this AC: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Captcha: exempt
What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
The final question in TFS is an example of a question that's bounced along the periphery of technology and now deserves centre stage. Nicely put!
Now, what are we going to do for a living after everything's been automated?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
...things that machines can not do and people will be needed for those tasks. The only people that will be out of jobs are the people with meaningless, repetitive task performing jobs. This happens in every generation as technology grows. People have to adapt to technology and learn to do jobs the latest and greatest machines can't do (or get an education). For example my Girlfriend's Grandmother used to work at the Crest toothpaste factory. Her job was to put the caps on the tubes of toothpaste. Fifteen years down the line they bought the latest and greatest machine that put the caps on the tubes automatically. Her grandmother had to learn to do something else at the plant or loose her job.
It's common sense people adapt or perish!
biggest factspinning and made up bullshit ive read in weeks.
It time to make full time 30-32 hours a week with overtime starting at 32 and more rules makeing it harder to pay people salary to get out of OT. or even push people under the min wage while working on salary with so menu hours.
More peopel working part time is better then a few people pulling 60-80+ hour weeks.
Maybe even over time 20 can be come the new full time.
The article says: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight "jobless recovery." But that's a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two. Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
That is not the case. The ratio of working age men who actually work has steadily fallen since the 50s (in the USA). After each recession it plunged and then recovered .... but not to the original levels. Data.
Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to the general topic and find the idea fascinating, the article has a lot of other questionable statements in it. Like this one: Even the most commonplace technologies — take, say, email — are making it tough for workers to get jobs. That's obviously wrong. Email and the net allow people to find employers around the world whereas before they might have been limited to their local area. Heck, I hired a commission artist just two days ago, I initiated contact via email.
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
You could learn to repair the machines, or learn to make the machines.
However, we have seen it before and we will see it again.
5000bc
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the wheel is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to the men who carry the litter?
1840's
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the machine is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to all the children that spin cotton?
1980's
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to the machine is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history? What will happen to all the people who calculate trajectories when they are replaced by a single machine?
The only constant in this world is that everything changes. I believe the old adage is "Lead, Follow, or get out of the way!"
"The response to the article includes the dutifully repeated bad-government-is-at-fault and don't-worry-it's-like-the-Industrial-Revolution memes."
Let's see what economics teaches us. See Human Action (http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf) p. 770:
"The market wage rate tends toward a height at which all those eager to
earn wages get jobs and all those eager to employ workers can hire as many
as they want. It tends toward the establishment of what is nowadays called
full employment. Where there is neither government nor union interference
with the labor market, there is only voluntary or catallactic unemployment." - Ludwig von Mises
Capitalism does not seem equipped to deal with labor saving tech other than to ruthlessly take advantage of it at the expense of human workers.
If we could automate everything, how would anyone earn a living?
I fail to understand what the top 1% think they will be able to do once they've accumulated all the wealth other than violently lose it again.
Time to sledgehammer every PC in sight at your work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
France has a 35 hour workweek already. Its seen, by conservative UK politicians, as a sign of a failed socialist state on the verge of economic implosion - but then again, they've been saying that for decades and it hasn't happened yet.
That is for a ton of reasons, but lets hear your most likely insane ramblings about it. It could be fun.
we were told that this would free us from drudge work and give us lots of leasure time. Unfortunately, all of the benefit goes to the already-wealthy, and the only leasure time we get is the time to be unemployed.
I hope they are building things that robots will buy!
A lot of intelligent, educated people can still get too caught up in ideologies to see the big picture.
In order to be viable in the market, a labor-saving device must, by logical necessity eliminate more work than it creates. This is the only way to get the total cost of ownership down below the cost of hiring people to do the work. When successfully applied widely enough, this processes has serious economic implications.
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work (you only need one genius to invent a trinket in order for everybody to be able to have one), so the majority of displaced workers cannot simply promote themselves to more interesting work. When production is very high but the labor cost is very low, you wind up with large masses of people who can't find *any* work (or at least nothing that provides a livable wage). That results in severe crime and upheaval.
As tech puts us all out of work, we either start adopting more socialist policies, we put most of our population in jail (where we pay for their needs anyway), or we experience a violent mess.
well we need more hands on training / apprenticeships.
The college system is kind of out of date and comes with the full load of fluff and filler classes. Tech schools are roped into the college system as well.
There is lot's stuff that is poor fit into a 2 year or 4 year plan and other stuff that needs a lot more hands on training that is a poor fit for a collgle class room. When more of a community College setting is better. Yes community College offer classes non degree.
Also the cost of college is getting to high and by cutting down what is now 4-5 years down to say 1-3 years can save alot and make it quicker to learn skills.
I understand that technology progresses, but at what expense? In the UK, I see the high street disappearing day by day, but what of the people who are now made unemployed? There are only so many coffee, grocery and clothing chains out there. What are they supposed to do? Same with outsourcing/downsizing - is everyone supposed to go and apply at Google?
It's true that technology is making the world a smaller and more connected place, but the elephant in the room seems to be, what happens when technology is so efficient that you no longer need a workforce?
From what little i've read, wages went up a lot towards the end. Today, you have below-inflation wage increases, many wages frozen and many taking pay cuts. The only increases are (in some ways debatably) unjustified and decided by the one/s receiving it.
Due to population increases not counteracting the increases in efficiency, there were food shortages. The Office for National Statistics showed between 2004-2007 the population increased by about 1mil. Whereas that's higher than the 19th century, as a % of the total it's far less. Plus, if you haven't noticed...we as a 'developed' nation throw away a LOT of food, so I doubt we'll have mass malnutrition (no more than we already do because people practically live in takeaways..)
In general, I think there are similar knock on effects of jobs vanishing, maybe coupled with the recession and a mass feeling of social dissociation things can and have been grim (e.g. riots), but I wreckon whatever's to come won't compare, and it will only be good if we move away from choking capitalist agendas forcing people to use their lives working when, lets face it, we would GLADLY let a robot do our job if it meant we didn't have to work..
Here's an interesting thought experiment: suppose we had Star Trek-like replicators, capable of instantly satisfying basically any material want. Without demand, how could the economy work? People would still want scarce resources like energy or land for homes; without the ability to earn money, how could those resources be equitably allocated?
Also: it isn't that this time is different; we've been moving slowly in this direction for more than a century. It's just coming closer and closer to a head.
I honestly can't find exactly what jobs are being killed. What jobs exactly are even considered middle class seems to be highly contentious and subjective.
Can anyone point out to me an exact list of which jobs are reducing by technology? I, personally, don't consider a manufacturing job to be middle class, for example. And, it would seem, neither does wikipedia: "The following is a list of occupations one might expect to find among this class: Accountants, Professors (Post-secondary educators), Physicians, Engineers, Lawyers, Architects, Journalists, Mid-level corporate managers, Writers, Economists, Political Scientists, Urban planners, Financial managers, High school teachers, Registered Nurses (RNs), Pharmacists and analysts, etc...[8][34]".
Oh noez! We have created systems to increase out efficiency and we have achieved it. Now we might have to work less! What a shame!
I think some of the commentors here need to go back to econ 101 (or just use their heads for five minutes).
Automation and increased unemployment are _inversely correlated_. If automation destroyed jobs, than how do you account for the trillions of jobs that have been created over the previous thousands of years given the creation of the wheel, the plow, the assembly line, the computer, etc.?
There are _tons_ of jobs being created by today's automation, just as there always has been with increased efficiencies. The problem is that those jobs aren't being created in the US! The taxes are too high, the regulation is too onerous, and the labor is too expensive. If we lack job creation in the US, we only have ourselves and our boneheaded policies to blame!
Technology has always been about progress with the downside that it reduces the humans required. This goes back to the wheel and the lever and continues to this very day. The only difference is the speed at which this happens. Society responds to this. Invention moves things forward. The decline of the US manufacturing base was well along before computers came into mass. While computers reduces the number of humans to manufacture goods they created an entirely new and large industry complete with labor force. We are now in a trend where these jobs, themselves, are under siege as technology automates them. In time something else will come along and there will be a market again. This has happened throughout human history. What society needs though is more people focused on figuring out that next thing and less time complaining because somebody is moving the proverbial cheese. Rest assured, somehow, somewhere, the chesse will be move. It doesn't really matter who is responsible. It it wasn't one party it would be another. Grow up.
All of these things are true:
What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?
Then we'll deal with it when the time comes. My suggestion is to handle it by letting the machines work while the rest of us have parties and write open source software (for those of us who think parties are boring).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
France has a 10%+ and growing unemployment rate. The idea behind a shorter working week is not "the entire country works less", the idea is that the work which does exist is distributed more evenly over the population. So people work less, but more people work, and because everything is so damn efficient and cheap the quality of life can still be pretty good.
That isn't likely to happen in a place like France because laws make hiring and especially firing people very difficult. So if you have some work that really needs 1.2 man weeks per week, the incentives are all wrong - instead of hiring two people to work part time and ensuring neither is overloaded, it makes far more sense to push the existing employee harder (and pay overtime if need be) because that way you hugely reduce your management risk. If you hire a second employee with the intention of having both work part time and it turns out the second employee can't handle the work, or is lazy or doesn't get on with the team or the amount of work to do unexpectedly drops it's hard to let go of them again. So it's best to not grow unless you really have to. And if you can use a machine, even better, even if that machine is perhaps not quite as good or flexible as a human might have been. You can switch the machine off when the order book is thin. No such equivalent for a person.
I love the idea of a 4-day working week, but when I think through the implications, I can't escape the feeling that labor markets would have to be radically deregulated for it to work. Employing lots more people to work less just increases the risk of personell problems so dramatically.
Art and sex. And, alas, politics.
Our oldest careers are, currently for the most part, not things machines can do well. Hopefully, they won't be able to surpass us in these fields for a long time yet. Until we have time to merge with our machines, at least.
The post-scarcity economy problem also involves the (relatively sudden) un-scarcity of labor, don't forget. Essentially, the problem is this: the transition. That transition is only really held up by a culture which sees labor as a literal measure of someone's value as a human being. The problem, then, really isn't a new economic system, it's the fucked-up values system of the old culture that we still haven't done any work on improving.
"We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology." (that's a string you can / should Google)
what about people who alternative-credentials are a better fit then the old College system. College is to much of a one size fit's all and its turning out people with big skills gaps. I not talking about Repetitive, simple jobs
Plumbers don't set in the class room for 4+ years before starting to work. No They do a trades / tech school with apprenticeship.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/18/manufacturing-industry-taps-colleges-help-alternative-credential
And CS is not IT and it's to much theory geared to programming and not the other BIG parts of tech / IT.
Using a negative term like "killing" rather than "becoming more efficient" or a like term to describe technological progression. We don't know what the future holds for us (oh wait, we've never known that), and it seems to make the terms "bad" and "bad for me" synonymous. The fact that the notion of having to be an adaptable workforce is borderline catastrophic says to me that we've had it pretty well for quite a while.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
There has already been talk of adding this human cost to the robots etc. If the robot replaces 5 humans, charge that annual cost to the business to pay for the humans to live. If the humans cost 50,000 per year....then there would be a 250,000 per year tax added to the robots cost to allow humans that lost their jobs to continue to live.
Plumbers do very little creative work.
Cs is not IT, and most CS grads don't have a good grasp of basic networking even. By that I mean what a subnet mask is and how it works(just one such example), not how to config a router. If you know the former the latter is just learning on piece of software. If you don't know the former you will never really understand the latter.
Automation of manufacturing has pretty much already happened. Instead of 40% of the workforce making stuff it's now at 8%.
Farming went through this earlier. Farming jobs are now somewhere around 5% of the total employment base.
As these sectors are already such a small part of the workforce changes aren't going to affect the overall economy that much.
So the question is what segments come next? It's going to be hard to outsource middle managers, as personal interaction is so big a part of their jobs. Engineers are too difficult - part of their jobs may even be beyond what a Turing machine can manage. Health care is obviously very personal.
Yes, similar bs worked very well for France.
The germany Dual education system is needed in the usa.
I will go ahead of the AC won't. During the depression progressives froze wages, business responded by offering incentives like health care and dental to work around the wage freeze when recruiting talented workers. It became an expected benefit, and then a codified one.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
In my extensive observation, most humans only work 30 hours a week anyway at anything beyond a plantation level job. You can make them sit in an office for 80 hours for appearances, but that just means 30 hours of work, and 50 hours of make-work, pretend, talking about sports tv real estate politics... Simply making people only sit at a desk when they actually work, will probably not improve hiring like you think. Now, 10 to 16 hours per week might actually work...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better health care than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.
Since we will be slaves to the machines, the work week should be 8 hours days on Monday, Tuesday. Get Wednesday and Thursday off. Work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Than get Monday, Tuesday off. Work Wednesday and Thursday. Than get Friday, Saturday and Sunday off. In a two week period one would work 7 days for a total of 56 hours or 28 hours a week. The machines would have their slaves 24/7 so they could be used around the clock. Every other weekend would be a three day weekend and one would never have to work more than three days in a row.
well need some kind of middle ground for CS down to skills like basic networking the tech schools do tech that but even them stuff like networking is so big that it should be on it's own track that is different from say programming or desktops / severs / office networking.
CS is a poor one size fit's all that does not work that well over all.
A person can make things as accurately as a machine, they just take longer. Accuracy can be verified by someone else, it just takes longer. All that sort of stuff is just labour-saving in another guise.
At the peak, a job in the unionized auto shops paid pretty well and had an awesome pension.
Nowadays, not so much.
It's a global economy. Things can be made cheaper in India, China, etc. whether it be software or hardware.
TFA: ''I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years."
No fscking duuuuuh
Did he used to believe that C. Babbage's machine gained sentience for a weekend until it blew a steam gasket trying to hump a fire-engine?
Table-ized A.I.
Different AC, but...
According to memory and ...yup... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#History...
In the US, following WWII there was nation-wide federally imposed wage (and price) controls. In order to get around the wage controls, employers would offer non-monetary benefits so as to attract workers, as the supply of able-bodied workers (i.e., men) was in short supply. Among these benefits, membership in the companies group health care plan (Citation Needed, I'm assuming group health care plans existed and operated in the 1950s similar to when I was last an employee in the 2000s).
It always does this.
America prided itself on being a country of middle class jobs. In part this is because originally technology ate the low end jobs. In part this is because of Unions demanding reasonable pay.
Worse, no one thinks they are low class. You can be making 40,000 a year and feeding a family of 8, but you claim to be middle class.
Now technology has upgrade to the point where it can eat low end middle class jobs. This is not a bad thing.
The same thing will happen as it always does - new jobs will be created by the technology, worse case scenario, more people do pure research.
Eventually everyone will be doing high end jobs or be unemployed. This is not a bad thing - as long as people doing the high end jobs pay for the unemployement benefits.
As more of the work that needs to be done is being done by machines, there's less work for humans. The logical thing to happen in this case is that everyone works less and less until the day that all work is done by machines. However, it's beneficial to companies if they continue to force their employees to work 40 hours a week. Indeed, many still see it beneficial to force their employees to work overtime on a regular basis. This works out well for companies since it means they always have a large stack of applications to point at whenever their employees start demanding reasonable pay and reasonable working hours.
Obviously, the ideal thing is to reverse the situation. Have people who currently have jobs work less, and the work they would have done be done by the currently unemployed. This will make it so that employees, and not jobs, are in demand, which will increase wages and decrease unemployment at the same time.
I created a petition to address this issue: http://wh.gov/EKAF
Someone please make it go viral as I have no idea how to do that, and it doesn't become visible on the wh.gov web site until it gets 150 signatures, so even people interested in the idea can't go there and search for such a petition to sign. Instead they have to create their own, which ends up being doomed to the same fate. It's no wonder all of the petitions that make it to 25,000 are just dumb shit created by massive online forums.
our tech jobs put us in the upper or lower class?
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
"If you can imagine something you can build it." However, I've long been a believer that it is part of human nature to pursue the impossible regardless of how impossible it may seem (i.e: that hot chick across the hall). So it may be more appropriate to re-write the old adage it as: "If you can imagine something, you WILL build it; and if you fail someone else will stand on your corpse and build it."
In short, if you fantasize long enough about machines doing your menial work for you... eventually by your hand or someone else's... they will.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
tech vocational / apprenticeship are needed.
There are some good mixed vocational / apprenticeship things out there but they only 2 year plans. There is to much put on to the university system and 4+ year degrees.
There are lot's of talk of skill gaps with Colleges and part of it has to do with the system being setup to drive people into teaching and not job skills. Also there is a lot of filler and fluff classes out there that are forced to to people going to university (ok some of them are hold overs from the pass but for some one who wants real jobs skills they are worthless topics that eat up time and costs) University used to be the place for rich kids (going back to the start of them) and not about job training. Over time they did become about stuff like doctors and other higher level theory. But we have come to far with them.
We are putting to much into going to University at the cost of vocational / apprenticeships that are better setup for getting skills. Tech schools are roped into the University system and that holds them back.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-selingo/unemployment-skills-gap_b_1880423.html
He knows. He's been told that a zillion times. He just has a hard-on for this topic.
CAPTCHA: sourness
well, ok.
We are surely not going to be more socialistic! At least not here in the US with the TeaPartiers calling everyone who get out of work through no fault of their own freeloaders as well as austerity taken into effect in Europe.
Right now, the wealthy are using their extra cash to make sure the government doesn't take their god given right cash saved through automation and will revolt! The Koch brothers are well financed and are afraid of the poor people.
The right in every country is going more and more extreme and the budget deficit shows it. They accuse Obama of being a radical socialist, not because he wants more socialism, but rather does not insist on cutting to the eldery and poor and letting the rich get more cars they do not need.
http://saveie6.com/
It is not delegating all work to the machines, that is a profound misconception. It is delegating all profits to the billionaires, and that, unfortunately, has a very, very long track record.
"What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
Right after mentioning the industrial revolution (albeit in a dismissive way). People don't actually think about the things they write anymore, do they?
If the previous 12+ years of school didn't teach you how to learn and think then 4 more isn't going to do the job either.
Not that simple.
Fixed costs will make it more expensive. Not everything is a variable cost.
It costs $12,000 for software/administrative cost for each $800 computer at work. $10,000 a year in taxes. In the US it costs $30,000 a year for health and liability insurance for someone making just $40,000 a year. Add $30,000,000 for the cost of the building and your $40,000 job cost $85,000 to an employer!
Why are wages flat? Because the costs keep getting higher and higher and your employer can't keep up with the price hikes. Just that you are not getting them.
So making everyone part time at half the wage could still double your costs.
This is the real push to India. It is not that the workers are cheaper. It is the fact you can get an office building for $250,000 not $20,000,000 for the same in San Jose. No health care costs. Taxes are 1/5th per employer. No sue happy lawyers. You can fire Djhrijad and not expect 1-800-sue-you! to come in demanding $10 million in compensation and harassment lawsuits etc. The cost of cheap Indian labor? Well yess that is a small part of it.
The US has a problem with all of the above. Conservatives whine that it is all about unions and taxes only. Fact is if we made it nearly impossible to sue and didn't have corruption and price gouging for health insurance we could hire millions more today! These costs are too much so it makes sense to overwork your existing employers right?
http://saveie6.com/
But what if this time it's different? What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
You could learn to repair the machines, or learn to make the machines.
Not if other machines repair the machines and make the machines.
However, we have seen it before and we will see it again.
Not quite. Just because it appears to have happened before doesn't mean that nothing changed or that there isn't an end.
In the pre-industrial age, most earned their income through brute labor.
Early machines took much of that away but there was still profitable tasks to done by trained hands doing the tasks that machines lacked the finesse for.
The factory automation came in, able to perform many of the many tasks that well trained hands previously did. It became difficult to make a living working with one's hands. But machines still weren't very smart and so people that were smart learned to make their living by using their brains.
But machines are getting smarter. They do brain work too and the kind of work they can do goes higher each higher. A knowledge worker can attempt to move up the food chain, of course, but eventually there will be no further up to go. If one can't profitable use one's brawn or one's brain, what is there left to do? Probably the last stand will be the artists. Human creativity feeding irrational human desires. Unfortunately, society has never provided many artists with a living wage.
Of course, this doesn't happen overnight or with 100% efficiency. There will always be a few people who someone make their living through archaic means. But there will come a time when most people will be unable to provide value beyond what machines are already doing.
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
For a business owner I do not give a shit. I want someone who can walk right in and make me money for the cheapest price with no training. If not then I won't hire you. Expanding your boundaries? That doesn't make me money.
Someone skilled does.
http://saveie6.com/
"When they don't need you anymore, they won't feed you anymore." This is the dilemma the working classes face right now, the existential crisis of the postindustrial proletariat. When we aren't required to produce goods or materials anymore, no demand for our labor will exist, and if any such demand remains the eligible labor pool will likely be so large and so bottom-heavy that the value of that work will be vanishingly small. Since practically nobody in the developed world owns any land anymore, much less enough to live on, and since even fewer people there actually have the skills necessary to survive in a subsistence culture, this isn't a realistic option. (But it is an option in the developing world, which will probably soon begin regressing as demand for their labor also vanishes and economic incentives to develop in those countries, aside from exploiting their natural resources and building walled luxury resorts, dry up.) In our present economic system our survival depends on our ability to secure a wage, and without income, you're effectively a non-citizen. No jobs means no economy; but at least the upper class will finally be able to detach themselves from the baggage of the working class for good.
The entire industrial apparatus of our society, from the stores, to the factories that supply them, to the infrastructure that supports them, to the resource extracting and producing outfits that power it all, is justified by the existence of labor and the ability of people to sell their time for money. Without labor, its entire reason for being, its entire business model, is gone. People just won't have money. They won't be able to pay for anything. This presents us with three possible outcomes, all of them essentially post-industrial. One of them involves effectively forbidding certain forms of automation in order to preserve work, especially in industries that would otherwise require large workforces. This is the 'Brave New World' option, where like in the text, there exist technologies that could completely eliminate work, but if they were used people would have nothing to do and nothing to get paid for. The second option is to aggressively tax revenue generated by all automation and pour the proceeds into a general welfare fund, which would finance a basic income guarantee, or BIG. The BIG has been floated seriously as a solution by a number of policy thinkers and some experiments have been tried, but the real test of BIG - whether it can support a post-industrial society without strife - remains to be seen.
The third option is to simply exterminate the working class. Depending on who you ask, this is either thought of as utterly unthinkable or an inevitability. It does handily solve the problem of what to do with the surplus population, and would also crater resource demand, leaving more for the remaining lucky souls that still own capital. Environmental crises exacerbated by population pressures would also diminish, ensuring that at least the survivors' futures would be brighter. We might think of that as a noble sacrifice.
To sane people, on the other hand, that scenario is preposterous. The notion of a surplus population is equally preposterous because people will always have a demand for themselves. (Unless they actively want to die, that is, and that's a problem that tends to solve itself.) This leaves the first two options as the most likely outcomes. A number of persons have also hypothesized that the evaporation of demand will exert powerful deflationary forces on the economy, and combined with the falling price of robots themselves over time, this will make the machines affordable to communities which would then be able to satisfy their own needs within self-contained, autonomous economies. It's the journey toward any of these outcomes, however, that is most murky and also the most frightening. It's now more clear than ever that technology is evolving far faster than policy, and in particular economic policy, and experimentation with trial programs is required now before large segments of the population become permanently displaced from the economy. The only thing we can be certain of is that the economic paradigm is going to undergo a dramatic transformation within our lifetimes and possibly very, very soon.
The State of Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, to which you are no doubt referring, pays between $1000 and $2000 dollars per annum to all natural persons who have [a] resided in the state for at least one year, and [b] applied for it. It is *not* meant to be an income guarantee. The point of the Permanent Fund was that future generations will be deprived of the value of that oil, so it would be nice if someone besides the ludicrously rich oil companies had something to show for it afterwards.
I have no idea whether you're arguing for or against a minimum income, but regardless, the Alaska PFD does not in any meaningful sense qualify.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
And who will have cash to buy all the stuff made by robots.
The best concrete example I've heard of why this situation is troublesome concerns an isolated, self-sufficient farm. Imagine the farmers build a machine to automate some of their work -- milking cows, collecting eggs, harvesting, cleaning, whatever. This is unambiguously a good thing. It means there's less work that needs to be done, so everyone gets more free time to use however they want. Survival just got easier. In the same vein, reducing the total amount of work needed to keep humanity fed, clothed, housed, and entertained ought to be a good thing. But it won't be until we can develop an economic system where less work and more leisure time doesn't come at such a high material and social cost.
I doubt we'll reach that point any time soon, though. There's still plenty of work to go around, and there are lots of other factors involved in the American middle class's problems.
Visit the
Why are managers threatened by technology? Their job is to provide high-level, high-abstraction assessments and concise communication and general coordination between teams and other managers. That's something that AI still stinks at.
I agree that things like Wiki's and intranet-based peer reviewing can reduce the need for managers in some cases, but it's mostly the culture of organizations that keep these from being adopted.
There is some truth to the Office Space scene where one manager's job is to "protect our clients from having to talk to our engineers".
Given a choice, high-level managers don't want to talk directly to computers, engineers, or non-diplomatic "grunts". They (secretly) want kissy-uppy lower managers to spoon-feed them easy-to-digest info. (Read Dale Carnegie's classics.)
Maybe the newer generation will accept more raw and blunt business communication, but again that's a cultural change, not technological one. (Technology may change culture, but the impact is usually gradual.)
Table-ized A.I.
You haven't been watching Adobe commercials lately, have you? You can make it go viral by slapping someone. That's also how you measure ROI on social media, btw.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Create Jobs and Increase Wages by Reducing Work Hours and Increasing Vacation Time
Fewer hours per week is obviously the way we'll have to move during the future, but employers don't want to do it. My 62 year old mother has been working 13 out of every 14 days for two months because the company she works for doesn't want to hire additional employees.
This works in favor of employers since, if they force everyone to work overtime, then there are fewer jobs available, which means that whenever anyone complains about wages, work conditions, or work hours, they can point to that stack of applications and say "either do what I say or you're fired." If we limit work hours, then employees will be in demand, which will reverse the situation.
Really? Then why do they have degrees in things such as Medicine, Law, Religion, Business, Psychology, CS, Economics, etc.? Shouldn't there just be one major: Thinking?
Colleges were created to train people for white-collar jobs. Trade schools were for blue-collar jobs.
But the reality is that colleges have not kept up with the changing society. There are way too many English and History majors, Lawyers, etc. and not enough low-level tech majors like programming factory robots or other IT tasks, which is where there is massive unemployment.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That's OK, most of the US is at will employment, so reducing the work week to 32 hours would work just fine in many careers. But in IT, it would be a disaster as we can't find enough people to hire as it is.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Then again, maybe I could get 2 30 hour per week jobs since I am used to working 50+ anyway.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
My next door neighbor was plumber. He didn't just clear blocked pipes and drains. He designed entire bathrooms and house renovations down to specifying the electric systems, insulation, types of wood, varnish, filing planning permission applications as well as the plumbing and drainage. In fact this was why there was a shortage of plumbers in the UK. They were all making more money from home renovations than from basic repairs.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I have ranted for years that we are at the edge of the end of the need for almost all human labor be it professional or lowly. Now somebody is finally getting a hint. But the end of labor also involves the total end of economies as we know them. That really is not a problem. Each citizen will simply receive a pay check from the government. Automated businesses will pay the taxes that pay for the pay checks. Businesses will still have to compete one with the next in order to attract bodies who carry those pay checks. At the next level the machines will replace the investors or owners. If a business does well it can purchase more robotics, more automation and more artificial intelligence. The end result will be a leveling of wealth with each person having the same level of pay and ownership.
That does not imply that people can not be healthier or happier after the shift. For gain or amusement one could do research, create great art, or even play checkers for money in the parks. But the difference is doing it because you want to and not because you need the money even though winning will still bring some rewards.
Essentially it is more dramatic than a sea change in government. It is way more controlling than a socialist or communist government could hope to be and yet will create more freedom than we have ever seen before. For example when a robot drives your car it will not break speed limits and be a lot safer than when you drive it yourself.
It is already happening and it will not be stopped.
The rising unemployment in France is due to the rapidly growing ethnic minority population that isn't good at passing exams.
Then we will stride boldly into that unknown and become more than we once were - for better or worse.
'What if delegating everything to machines is a radical and fundamental new change in the course of human history?"
What if the author of this question had read some Science Fiction, much of which explored this very theme decades ago?
"Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool".
the powers that be are getting a rein in on that. The ruling class has taken back the media. Sure, they let them have their little liberal social issues, but on economics it's conservative capitalism 24/7. The little guys didn't do much revolting for over 2000 years, and got put down every time they did (didn't turn out so good for Napoleon, did it?).
The assumption you're making is that you're going to win in the good vs evil fight. Even if good doesn't win, you'll win. You won't. They'll come for you soon too. For all of us. There's nothing you have that the ruling class won't take away. Their greed knows no limits or bounds. It's what they do. They have enough wealth to buy anything. They teach us that if somebody just gives it to you you'll stop there. But that's a lie. They didn't stop. They never stop.
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It depends on where you live.
Here in Seattle, unemployment is 6.1 percent both in the city and in King County, while it's 7.7 percent in the State (or rural and suburban areas).
Industry is growing in Seattle. We make things. Things like fair trade organic chocolate. Things like distilled liquor. Things like planes that have outsourced battery systems from Japan ... but the plane made here works fine.
The problem is really that Wages are at a 50 year low and Profits are at a 50 year high. The old split used to be 50/50 for Capital/Labor and right now it's about 90/10.
There's your problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
if nobody's poor?
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you think the moon landings were faked, too?
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Have they factored in the loss if jobs in developed countries? In other words,are we really doing a lot more with a lot fewer people or are we employing different people to do our work?
I don't lead $@!^. I'm barely getting by. I think the phrase you're looking for is "Digging our own graves".
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They're trying to scapegoat technology to cover their own mistakes. I've seen the same shit inside my own family -> "the video games made me do it, dad!" Their response? They throw out the video games.
Your job losses are heavily correlated with your ineffectual leaders, leaders bred to dodge blame at every opportunity, blame which is so toxic that it can end a man's life before he has a chance to learn from his mistakes.
I am John Hurt.
There are only two classes. There is a Capitalist class and a Working class. Arguably there is also an underclass: people who would be working class if there were jobs.
more or less. A closet maker that used a CNC machine to do everything. They send a guy out, he measures your closet space, they put the figures in and it cuts the wood. From there it's no different than Ikea furniture. A friend did their IT, and couldn't figure out why the freaked out so much when the computers went down. Until he realized that nobody there know the first thing about woodworking. Accountants do it to now. Doctors too
When I was a kid they talked about the coming of expert systems. Databases that told you how to do anything. They're here, and they make us all pretty powerless...
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The mandate to hold liability, while it has its reasons, induced insurance companies to roll all of their risk into the price of liability, so that those who only pay liability are in fact shouldering part of the cost of the risk of those with full coverage. I don't have a better answer, I'm just saying its not perfect.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I know a lot of people do not like those who are filthy rich, but you guys need to know this ...
Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys.
They got to where they are because of one thing - they got tired of working for someone else.
I know, I know, the recession and the tech have killed a lot of middle class jobs, but to some, this crisis is the perfect chance for them to do something about it ... like starting their own business, instead.
So ... why are you guys moaning the loss of your work?
What is the use of complaining?
Do you think that by complaining here (and elsewhere) you can get a better job?
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Aristotle: "most technology has already been discovered." He was, of course, saying that the most important aspect of human affairs is politics. And he was saying it in the book which was dedicated to describing the nature of politics. He did a fine job of the latter despite the silly opinion on scientific progress. Let's deconstruct a little bit. If nothing else, more advanced technology requires a longer period of initial entry point preparation. So more of a life span is spent on studying than before. Which requires more educators, newer methods of education, etc. It seems like most people in education "industry" seem to think they can cash in on that by simply providing more of their services at more expensive prices, but, of course, it will not work. Inefficient constructs will fail over medium term (not short as the students hope), but not long (as the teachers hope). As for the larger question, in general, whenever you hear someone say "this time it's different", they are selling something. Here's why: the point of this phrase is to get a person to throw away their current priorities... to disregard everything they care about at the moment. Once their life priorities are diminished, they are more willing to explore new directions (ie, other priorities) for their time, money, body, etc.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The roots of this need to be planted in high schools, where the emphasis needs to be on kids learning how to learn. Life will be full of challenges, and being able to learn a wide variety of skills in different ways will become the critical skill.
Instead of asking 'will maths/science/English be useful for my everyday existence', they should be asking 'what methods of learning should I be applying to the diverse array of topics, and what methods work best in which situations for myself'.
there are lot's IT people looking for jobs so why are people not getting the jobs.
If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort.
...by those who own the machines, and all the other capital needed to make any kind of living in the world. The rest of the people, who own nothing of any importance and only get to use the owners' things in exchange for their labor, will be SOL when their labor is no longer needed.
The solution to the problem of course is to fix the underlying problem where only a small set of people own the world, and the rest of us rent it from them. When we're all shareholders in the means of production, then the savings provided by automation will actually benefit us all. Until then, it only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
But, I see you get to that in the end anyway:
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
I agree completely, but think that the anti-automators needs to be responded to first and foremost by pointing out that while they are absolutely right that there is a problem, the real problem is ownership disparity ("income" per se doesn't really matter, if your income comes entirely from labor and we're talking about eliminating the need for that labor). People afraid of automation have a very valid concern, but it's not really with automation, and their concern needs to be pointedly redirected to the real problem: that they don't own the automatons.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Middle class jobs have already been replaced in the past - you just weren't around at the time
Buy real estate. It always goes up. It was true for my entire life--until just a few years ago.
Need a longer time frame? OK. Gold is a stable currency. Oops! Conquistadors. Gold inflation. For a while. Then it was stable again... sort of.
There's nothing that says this iteration of technological progress will pick up the slack the way previous iterations did. The possibility that we've hit a particularly tough patch of sod should not be discounted.
Toffler's "Future Shock" covered this ground in 1970 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock )
We need to base society on some other exchange rather than hours of labor.
What evidence is there that fluff courses "teach you how to think"? They do push people toward accepting a particular (pc) viewpoint, but how does that benefit society?
Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys.
(citation needed)
There are plenty of mechanisms in place which make it easy to assume most of the filthy rich made it because they were born into wealth, either directly through inheritances or indirectly through financial help, family connections, and better schooling. Just as an example, 4 of the top 20 richest people on earth are part of the Walton family, which inherited their wealth from Sam Walton.
That isn't to say I dismiss your point outright, but I think I need to see some actual data before I accept your point.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool.
I took a few college classes, and right now I'm thinking "not fucking tradeschool" so it looks like it worked!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The Luddite argument has been wrong for 200 years and will continue to be wrong. The only thing I see changing this is the possibility of strong AI -- and that will change EVERYTHING.
... easy to assume most of the filthy rich made it because they were born into wealth ...
If that's what you like to think, that's what you'll end up thinking.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
Our current society's view of college is very different from what it used to be. In the past, a much smaller proportion of the population attended college, and there were really three types of students.
First were the children of the already wealthy, of the classes that owned things. Then as now, they really didn't have to worry too much about what was studied. The goals of a college education were to enrich oneself, have fun, socialize with wealthy peers, and maybe find someone to marry. These were the students who had the luxury of choosing what topics to Think about.
Second were the non-wealthy children of the skilled classes, or aspirants to that class. The goal was to learn skills that would distinguish you from the common laborer, skills that people would give you money for (be it a boss, customer, or patron). Any courses which taught you to "think" did so in a highly focused and career-directed manner.
Third were the non-wealthy but truly obsessed prodigies -- obsessed enough to risk future poverty, gambling that their talent was talented enough that could make their future livings teaching the previous two groups (or perhaps even talented enough to attract a patron to support them).
In modern times, many students aspire to pursue the studies following the style of the first and third groups, and schools are glad to cater to them, thanks to all the loans being dished out freely. Consider that many decades ago, business school delivered a highly vocational education; it is only in modern times that it took on a more academic style, that began to teach the theories of "why?" rather than just the "how?". Unfortunately, nothing comes for free; there is always a trade-off in money or time, so we now have far too many students who know the "why" without the "how". Especially when that "how" is "How do I pay back all these loans?"
Exactly... like the Rothechild's, Jim Walton, Bill Gates, who started at the top and worked his way up, Warren Buffet, who also started as a child of privilege, ...
In fact, well over 2/3 of the current wealthiest americans all started rich.
They got their because their PARENTS were already wealthy and in America, your parents' income now accounts for 50% of your adult income potential- that's worse then many companies in EUROPE where it only accounts for 10%.
America HAS some benefits- like forgiving you if you go bankrupt. You actually can start over again here unlike so many places (unless the reason is student debt- then you are frakked).
But "land of opportunity" isn't one of them in the way you are talking.
You can work your way up a rung or two. The rest is all connections, family names, and inherited money.
And now those guys are using the money to buy machines which have been destroying jobs for almost a generation (15 years).
Once you stop employing people- you can't use the capitalist model any more.
If you have a job- do what I did. Save over half of what you made. Don't carry any debt. Then when they lay off 500 of you and take a SEVEN figure raise for "saving money on salaries", you will be safe.
Worst run offshoring/outsourcing I've ever been part of. Our replacements didn't even arrive until 4 months after the layoffs- most of us were already gone. Companies probably screwed... but wait- that just means the executives are all going to get TWO YEARS PAY for highly damaging the company.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Once strong AI apps hit the market, all of you will be out of jobs. Imagine AI-based posters posting on Slashdot, millions of posts per hour. Only other AI would be able to keep up with the threads.
I cannot understand this gibberish.
You ain't seen nothing yet. There's a short story about where all this is going.. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm.. two models of the future in there, but I only find one plausible.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
at the Holodeck.
All those things that a supercomputer could do 20 years ago ... they got done.
So that powerful tablet is doomed to executing Angry Birds because the interesting
problems that might create economic wealth still need a supercomputer and
always will.
"America HAS some benefits- like forgiving you if you go bankrupt. You actually can start over again here unlike so many places (unless the reason is student debt- then you are frakked)."
Yeah, which some (already rich), use to buy companies suck their money dry, declare bankruptcy and move to a new target. Increasing their fortune out of that.
In my opinion they are the real society parasites, not those living on food stamps..
That is all.
At the same time of fewer and fewer living wage jobs, the GOP still wants to 'Ayn Rand' the shit out of the US.
It's what Jesus would have done.
Yep, pretty much the post I was going to write.
I remember back in the '70s there was some discussion about investing on the behalf of citizens by governments to ensure basic levels of support --- see Hal Clements' mention of ``draft dodgers'' in his short story ``The Mechanic''.
Bit late for that now --- perhaps a tax on CPU processing power?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is very insightful, not funny. Bunch of morons, *THINK*!
1. Without language you can't learn anything, including how to communicate efficiently
2. Without any schooling, how many would reinvent calculus? How about simple physics of ancient Greeks? I seriously doubt it. Even ancient Greek math is out of the question.
Yeah, almost everyone would be as "dumb" as a horse if it wasn't for what came before and us reading and understanding it.
I've often heard this meme about soldiers refusing to fire on their own countrymen. Is there any example of a professional military refusing such orders?
Yet we can't blame everything on cheap labor either. A lot of manufacturing has been returning to the United States. The problem is that the new model of manufacturing does not generate the same number or quality of jobs that it did for traditional factories. Today, you may have a handful of well paid, highly skilled labor doing advanced design and engineering work and then a mass of low-wage employees doing menial labor that is not cost effective to automate... yet.
Wages won't go up, it simply means we'll all be working 32 hours a week for 32 hours worth of wages. This of course assumes that you can find the quantity of employees who are able to do the job to run that sort of staffing scheme.
John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education", IN FULL, online
* "education* was paid-for by the coal-industry, to eradicate autonomy from all "worker" population ( no more back-talk or independent thinking )
* it was modeled on the LOWER-caste Hindu education
etc...
( Benjamin Franklin was mostly self-taught, as was Lincoln...
and I've read the writings of historical slaves who were more learned than the modern "average" nowadays )
Wikipedia's copy of his Main thesis
What does the school do with the children? Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":
---
Think about it:
any child who's ALLOWED to think autonomously...
is a threat to School's Authority(tm)...
and, once out of school, the "Authority" is different, but the principle's the same...
We geeks have it good:
science is a method, and it is objective
( appeal to authority is broken by Universe being itself, & testable )
but outside of our culture, anyone who holds to
Truth Is Testable, and ANYONE can discover what is more-true...
gets beaten on, broken, and maybe accused of being a "terrorist" too,
like that convicted felon "Jesus" you may have heard of...
Bullying leverages itself against all it feels to be threat, automatically,
and making certain that rural "education" leaves its product, many real lives as incapable of autonomy, functional planning, or even effective thinking, as possible is something I've seen too damn much of...
Any population dumbed-down enough is prevented from self-determination, or, in other words,
any population dumbed-down enough is subjugated to "authority" managing their resources & lives, helplessly.
Damage done through abuse or neglect doesn't get undone quickly or without great work/cost.
In the McCain/Obama election this was shown again:
many latinas live in a culture that disallows their personhood/validity much as the women of the suffragette era did to white women,
and they were committed to bloc voting for McCain/Palin...
Why? because in the animal-logic of the beaten,
simply having someone of one's kind appear in the "authority"-category feels animal-validating...
that they were committed to giving incorporated money greater rights & removing influence & wasteful/costly social-support from poor latinas, their entire category of people, was incognizable to all in their induced-condition...
Machiavelli was a pro, for his time...
what the standard is, nowadays,
would sicken him...
( hint: read "Women's Ways of Knowing", which identifies 4 modes of human-meaning, 1 of which is what our culture calls "battered women syndrome"...
and consider the places in the world where ENTIRE POPULATIONS are in that mode, where peace cannot be won unless it is imposed until the mind-damaged population is replaced with a syst
Here's my first question: Since when are assembly-line jobs considered middle class? IMHO, these are lower class jobs. If you take offense to that, A) tough noogies and B) what then ARE lower class jobs?
Second question: What makes anyone think that dismissing technological advances and replacement of menial tasks with machines in favor of simply preserving the paycheck of a human is a good idea? Machines don't demand benefits, a pension, and a pay raise every year. Do you really think the employers are going to simply take the extra costs up the a$$? Hell no. They will either pass the costs on to the customer thus resulting in inflation or they will go out of business.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way.
And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
In fact, well over 2/3 of the current wealthiest americans all started rich.
Of course they did you are talking about the top top top of wealth.
They started with a lot and grew it bigger whats so bad about that
Now take a look at the thousands of Americans like my younger brother
That are worth over one million we were just regular middle class growing up
My brother started his own company when he was young and worked his ass off
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
let me guess, the plausible one is the force concentration of unemployed into Terra housing. I believe the same thing and what a horrible future that would be.
And to the poster above about rich come from rich. I counter with Steve Jobs and Mark Zukerberg.
I believe, and have been believing for more than a decade now, that we are in a transition into a new era, which would best be simply described as an age of cyberpunk. Giant quasi-national corps and mainly administrative nations ruling large chunks of regular ultra-economized life with the fringes morphing into different, post-industrial citizen societies alltogether, with areas where money isn't worth as much as reputation or skill or simular non-monetary values such as honor or membership in some group like something quasi-religious or something. Human interaction will be paid for, stuff and convenience will come free.
Pick your standard William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel on the subject and you get the picture of what I mean.
The simple fact is: we are living in paradise with a bizare abundance of things quite a few of which would have been considered impossible in the 50ies.
The shit our field has been whishing for humanity all along has finally arrived. You can get computers that would have been considered borderline magic two and a half decades ago and would have taken up a mid-sized 5-story building; so powerfull, lightweight, easy to use and with software usefull and manifold beyond comprehension for a single individual, so cheap, they can be payed for with 4 days of regular manual unskilled labor!
Just last night I saw a poster of an offering for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi for 250 Euros. Two-hundred and fifty fucking euros! I payed more than 2 times that much for my friggin Sony MD700 Minidisk player back in 1997, a device so old-school in its tech and so single-purpose, it close to appears to come out of the early steam age compared to my HTC Flyer.
The truth is we've basically just about arrived at where we wanted to go. 5 years into the future algorithms and large computing clusters won't just be interpreting language, they will be translating it, and quite probably in real time. Tablets will have print resolution, weigh less than a book, have 15+ hours of uptime of the grid, be forever connected for a token fee and do *anything* you would want to be able to do with such a device ... and then some. And they will cost as much as a round-trip to the next big city.
Jobs are dropping left, right and center because they aren't needed anymore. Imagine when paper documents have finally moved out. An entire field of jobs will simply vanish.
I made compareatively big bucks developing in Flash/AS3 5 years ago. Proprietary lock-in stuff. Neat, but adobe totally missed the touch-screen dev train. Tough luck. Now I'm lucky if I even get one gig in that field every two years. I'll probably be doing specialized vertical market PHP and webdev the next few years for less money and after that, who knows? Even the LAMP stack is so old-tech I feel like in an entertainment programme when developing for it. ... Maybe afters this I'll become a massager for old lonely ladies and do touch-screen development just for the kicks on the side.
Bottom line: The world our field lives in and caters to is changing. Fast. We're seeing to that ourselves.
It's the age of cyberpunk, plain and simple. That's what I call it anyway.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
According to Ray Kurtzweil, we'll reach the singularity by 2030. That's when machines are supposed to be nearly as smart as people and when people will have to meld with technology in order to keep pace. Fortunately for me, I'll be old enough to retire by then :-)
That isn't to say I dismiss your point outright, but I think I need to see some actual data before I accept your point.
You are quite right to doubt him.
Relative upwards mobility (in the US) is quite limited from everything I've read. Generally you end up in the same income quintile as your parents. Absolute income may be higher (hopefully, if you want to keep up with inflation), but relative income stays the same.
There are tons of articles online on the subject. Here's a cute little video that explains relative vs absolute income change. They claim the upper and lower quintiles to be "sticky" (i.e. less likely to see movement). They seem to have some interesting research on the subject of economic mobility.
The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle income shuffle around. In Canada we're finding the "middle class" quintiles (middle 3 groups) are spread quite wide now. A family income of $40K-$125K is considered "middle income". A family making $125K is a whole different standard of living and level of financial security from one making $40K. If a tax policy benefits people that make more than 70K but less than 125K can we actually call it a tax break for the middle class? The US middle class looks a lot more compact (by some quick googling). Of course that's because the wealth is a lot more concentrated at the top in the US. In the US you have to make >380K to be a 1%er. In Canada a mere 280K will get you into the 1% club.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
When you stand back and look at it dispassionately, the population of human beings on this planet has been growing because there are no natural constraints. It's got to the point where there are serious question marks over whether we can sustain the population we have, yet it continues to grow. It's certain that at some point something will occur to impose an equilibrium. I fear it won't be very pleasant!
There is a saying on Wall Street and forgive me if I don't quote it verbatim but it goes something like this...
To turn $2 million dollars into $20 million dollars takes patience. To turn $2,000 into $20,000 takes skill.
I would go so far as to argue that to turn the 2 grand into 20 takes skill as well as luck. The point is that when you have a large amount to start out with, you practically have to be brain damaged not to be able to grow that money through safe investments. It takes considerable luck and skill just to go from being poor to slightly less poor. I would whole heartedly agree that we should all blindly try to be entrepreuners to better our lives but I think that you discount just how hard it is to make a living as an entrepreuner versus how easy it comes to somebody who is already successful.
First, if robots take over all of our jobs and give us more free time for our families AND we can still make a living that will sustain a family, then I am all for it. As a person who has programmed those assembly line robots, it is to eliminate human error and costly waste. There are somethings robots just can't do, but if it is a routine task that is deterministic, it is a better fit. We need to educate our population to be able to have higher skilled positions. We need more education (and people to CARE about their education) than we need less robots. Middle class is not made up of assembly line workers. Maybe in Detroit they were, but we see where that went. The cities have agreements with manufacturers to limit the hourly wage to keep the local area competitive. Government does prohibit progress. So does corporate greed. You have to find out which is worse in your cities. I have seen both cases. We also need to offer more trade related classes than just academic classes. Making people do the same math from 4th grade to grad school is just inane. If someone is interested in finance, teach them financial math. If they are interested in engineering, teach them the maths required for engineering. If we target education to actual careers instead of this generalized method that few people care about, I think more people will come out of school with actual fundamentals to get good paying jobs. Make the fluff optional. I like the rest, but I think it causes some people to tune education out.
In fact you can quantify the effect that the rich tend to stay rich in the US and the poor are stuck in poverty using something called the "intergenerational mobility index". Basically, the US is one of the worst countries in this regard and it has gotten that way mostly over the last few decades. Here is a summary from "The Price of Inequality," by J. Stiglitz, p. 18.
"It is at the bottom and the top where the United States performs especially badly: those at the bottom have a good chance of staying there, as do those at the top, and much more so than in other countries. With full equality of opportunity, 20 percent of those in the bottom fifth would see their childen in the bottom fifth. Denmark almost achieves that - 25% are stuck there. Britain, supposedly notorious for its class divisions, does only a little worse (30%). That means they have a 70% chance of moving up. The chances of moving up in America, though, are markedly smaller (only 58% of the children born to the bottom group make it out)."
Data on these claims:
"Some 62% of the children of those in the top quintile wind up in the top 40%"
from "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America:" http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2008/02/economic-mobility-sawhill
The point of college/university is to teach you how to think not fucking tradeschool. The classes you refer as filler and fluff are the damn point!
I do wonder, though, if they might have taught you to write, and without using expletives; and a little punctuation would help too!
That said, I actually agree with you. A well-rounded education, along with the ability it gives to reason, is far more important than a job-oriented trade-school education whose skills become obsolete within the lifetime of a career.
To this I would add that emphasizing an engineering curriculum does not meet the above criteria, which your poor writing ability might reveal.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way. And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
Actualy, the ability to reason has to emerge far sooner than age 20.
I agree that the costs associated with getting a formal education and degrees are too high. As to the reasons, I do not choose to elaborate at length here. More to the point is your contention that reading and the Internet can substitute for classroom and homework. I tend to think that it cannot because one really has to produce results to show what you've learned. It might be possible to take a programming course on-line, provided you have to submit to code reviews, also on-line. But I'd be concerned if you told me that your qualifications to be a brain surgeon came from taking on-line courses.
The already bureaucracy-laden world of Corporate America would be much more efficient with less middle-management in most place I've seen.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
"As tech puts us all out of work, we either start adopting more socialist policies, we put most of our population in jail (where we pay for their needs anyway), or we experience a violent mess."
you think that's it? Hopefully you don't feel like that is the answer, but that the crappy gov'r does.
Everyone reads the science and tech news. There are not just new gadgets for the masses to covet (and have reinforced by socialist thinking that 'everyone deserves it'). New discoveries are being made at hundreds of universities, many that mean that how we saw and did things can now be seen and done in a whole new way. This requires others to take those discoveries and toy with them, tweak them, innovate, experiment more. That creates more jobs, more opportunities, more growth. Especially if the damn gov't keeps its dumb-ass out of the way. It is a critical part of a free-market/capitalistic society. Screw socialism. Ask the 50-70-year old russkies, poles, ukranians, georgians, Lats, Liths, and estys.
I have the same fear as well. Technology serves to make our lives easier, every day. As factory jobs are replaced by machines, those displaced workers can now focus time and energy into developing new technology that displaces more workers. Technology is different from previous job-eliminating revolutions in that it has a final foreseeable goal: to automate everything we do. Once all of our work is automated, NO ONE will have work. This is my biggest fear... a world with no work, with nothing to do, with no weekday laboring to make you enjoy those sweet, sweet weekends. It's like the world of the Little People in Methuselah's Children. It was a permanent vacation that drove most of the men crazy.
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
All of the housewives (and a couple husbands) I know have some sort of business started in selling crafts, writing, landscaping or other semi-talented labor, and most of them don't make what they could be making if they were employed/contracting, some lose more money than they make.
I know several friends who started businesses with investment and several unfortunate enough to use their own.
Basically, what I'm trying to say, is that I know there are success stories of a few people that are always held up in front of us as encouragement, but I have not yet met anyone who "got rich" from starting their own business, and I've seen many try.
You have to accept that the economy is not a natural thing, it's a human made game whose outcome HAS TO BE beneficial to humans by definition. All the laws and regulations and trade agreements and monetary policy and all these complex things will either serve the general welfare of humans of *get thrown the fuck out* and replaced by something that does.
IF you want to see what a "natural" economy looks like, head over to Somolia or Rwanda or Congo. Pack your pretty wife or girl friend too and stay a few weeks "free of goomint regulation" in your perfect Ayn Randian "free market" with all those supermen who have gained positions of power thanks to being free from that damn 'goobmint and tell us how it goes for you.
The economy is not a natural thing. It's a game; an agreed upon lie that can and should be replaced when it starts to fail with something that works. . Maybe that something is just a little bit of socialism where we all work some hours and get what a lot of of what we want in return. The reality that is technological progress could take us there and if it does,who the fuck cares ? When we can grow houses
http://www.popsci.com/arbona/article/2006-11/grow-your-second-home
and clothes and high quality protein meat is created in test tubes ,
http://www.helium.com/items/2162168-meat-grown-in-test-tubes-only-a-few-years-away
that is when food clothing and shelter are too cheap to meter , then what? Something new. Something we haven't thought of, that's all.
Sure tech is ruining the economy. Is it really that surprising? The economics of scarcity is the ultimate buggy whip.
Why don't you start your own business, for a change?
a) Starting a business takes a shitload of money
b) I don't have a shitload of money
c) Nobody will loan me money, because I'm already in debt up to my eyeballs
d) Every business in the universe has been done 15,000 times already anyway
a) Starting a business takes a shitload of money
That depends on what kind of business you're starting, and what you think a "shitload" is.
c) Nobody will loan me money, because I'm already in debt up to my eyeballs
The "why" is important, there. And if you have a good plan that will make money, the capital is always available.
d) Every business in the universe has been done 15,000 times already anyway
Every successful business you can think of could say the same. That doesn't mean anything.
You don't think wages will go up if unemployment reaches zero? The bottom of the labor pool is going to be the least desirable workers. If you're only paying minimum wage, they are who you'll end up with. Indeed, if unemployment is driven negative, you may not even get them by offering only minimum wage if you don't have excellent working conditions or something else to attract workers. As for not being able to find enough employees, either a company offers enough pay that it can, or it has it's current employees work more than 32 hours per week (which then costs it more, just as offering better pay would have) or it goes out of business. So either the CEO stops paying himself 500 times what his employees make so that he can give them all an extra dollar an hour, or he doesn't have a job because the company goes out of business because it's unable to produce any products because it can't hire enough employees.
This isn't even a new idea. I was talking about it with my Mother and nephew, and my nephew pointed out that it was similar to a part of "The New Deal" he was learning about in school. It only makes sense that, as machines continue to do more and more of our work, that the work week of everyone should become shorter and shorter. If it doesn't become shorter, then it only makes sense that unemployment should continue to grow. So we have to decide if we want to move in the direction of more unemployment, or if we want to move in the direction of everyone getting a smaller share of the work pie.
I do wish I could have explained better in the petition, but there's an 800 character limit. It took me hours to write that petition simply because I had to keep finding ways to say things that used fewer characters. ...and I believe it's suffering as a result. Since it isn't just a joke like "build a death star" it actually requires a little space to explain it properly, but without that space, people are left confused about what exactly they are asking for if they sign it. One friend asked "so you expect the government to just fill in the details, or what?" I had to explain that this isn't the sort of thing where it hits 25,000 signatures and becomes law. At best, the president takes the suggestion seriously, and then suggests to congress that they do something of this sort, and then a whole slew of people analyze the idea and rewrite it to what they decide would work best. Thus, the petition is nothing more than to say "there are other ways to create jobs, you don't have to keep breaking windows."
Unfortunately I may be forced to create another petition (at the new 100,000 signature limit) simply to include a link to a web page that is far more educational about the idea. What few people have bothered to give me feedback about it have simply misunderstood the implications due to its brevity.
"Most of those who are filthy rich were originally from lower to middle class, just like you guys."
Yeah like Bill Gates,
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
I didn't come from middle class. For that matter I didn't have a chance to get reasonable education.(and I am not stupid, I speak freely in couple of languages, I understand computer on rather advanced level)
I came from one economical crisis, into another. I am by no means am lucky to still be alive and not be in jail(many people I knew in childhood ended up in Jail r dead before I turned 25). I am simply not lucky enough. From that prospective, I can't start business. I can barely survive WORKING. I did try to get college education, but due to lack of any social security at the time of studying, i was not able to.
Just cause YOU had a chance to finish college, does not give you right to be self righteous. There are many stories like mine here on Slashdot.
This is why universal health care will spur more "small business" than the GOP can shake a stick at... a lot of the "working middle class" are hanging on to the jobs they have rather than starting their own venture because health care for a family is just so darn hard to get without an employers "group buying power". Make it easier for people to take a chance and not put their family's heath at risk and watch a lot of smaller ventures take a chance!
It is like we see everything is running fine, then we develop technology to give machines a little more power, check to see if everything is OK and rinse and repeat. One day will we give machines too much power and it will be too late? When are we going to cross this line when machines and technology take over us? In the effort for machines to protect us will they kill any human that resists "the greater good" like in "I Robot"? Will it be like "The Matrix" when humans serve machines? Is is possible to live in peaceful symbiosis with a machine race that is stronger, faster, and smarter than we are and still maintain control over our own lives? At what point should we stand up and say "No More!"? When we reach that point will we be able to stop? Will we be so addicted to technology that we will not be able to stop when we need to?
Which means we might finally be able to work less while still having plenty to eat. That should be good, as we can simply spent more time enjoying life. :)
The only question is, how are those increased profits distributed.
hany