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5 White Collar Jobs Robots Already Have Taken
bizwriter writes University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimated in 2013 that 47 percent of total U.S. jobs could be automated and taken over by computers by 2033. That now includes occupations once thought safe from automation, AI, and robotics. Such positions as journalists, lawyers, doctors, marketers, and financial analysts are already being invaded by our robot overlords. From the article: "Some experts say not to worry because technology has always created new jobs while eliminating old ones, displacing but not replacing workers. But lately, as technology has become more sophisticated, the drumbeat of worry has intensified. 'What's different now?' asked Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst at market research firm Outsell. 'The pace of technology advancements plus the big data phenomenon lead to a whole new level of machines to perform higher level cognitive tasks.' Translated: the old formula of creating more demanding jobs that need advanced training may no longer hold true. The number of people needed to oversee the machines, and to create them, is limited. Where do the many whose occupations have become obsolete go?"
Do you even realise that it is not supply of money that is limiting people's wealth, it is supply of production, or do you not realise that? Money is a measure stick, the wealth is not cash, it's what you can produce and savings that are based on real excess production that is exchanged for other goods/services/investments/savings.
You can't use 'technology of money creation' to do anything except to create inflation (expansion of the money supply) thus reducing the relative value of money and destroying its worth.
It's like you have 1 ton of steel that you mined. You can use 1 dollar to measure its worth or you can use 1 Trillion dollars to measure its worth, that number is irrelevant to how much steel you have.
Providing the entitlement of the so called 'basic income' creates a situation where the currently idle population simply procreates to consume all of the resources allocated to them for free. So as an example the idle population of 1,000,000 becomes population of 1,000,000,000 and where the 'basic income' was enough to sustain 1,000,000 comfortably the new 1,000,000,000 are so poor on it, they are now demanding the entitlement to be increased proportionately to their numbers.
Well, so where does that extra excess productive capacity come from to feed the new 99,000,000? Well, the 1,000,000 would have had to WORK to create enough WEALTH to sustain the new 99,000,000 (who also would have to work).
Providing the so called 'basic income' is a recipe for greater and greater, bigger and bigger more and more massive levels of poverty among larger and larger idle population.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet (kinda like the human batteries from The Matrix)
I tend to look to the past for what we will find in the future and this immediately brought to mind 'A Modest Proposal' with its suggestion for the proper use of 'excess human population'. Just to save you from doing any research, it is the same that was found in Soylent Green (but much better written, Johnathan Swift possessed wit)
Of course, Spock's Brain comes to mind as our robotic overlords become to advanced to be bothered with tending to the 'plumbing' and outsource the more mundane work to our feeble human brains
The expositions of the future used to envision a world where automation resulted in a life of ease for us mere humans, this could still be the case if the concentration of wealth to the upper echelons can be avoided
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I used to agree with you on the basic income, but now I'm not so sure. The mistake a lot of socialists tend to make is assuming that humans will go do some thing useful with their time if they have no need to work to survive. I think this is not a valid general assumption, and if it isn't then socialism eats itself (interestingly in the same way capitalism eats itself due to greed), not due to an inability to supply the needs of the population, but due to social breakdown. These days I'm starting to think the best solution is to democratise knowledge on a grand scale. In the end the real driver of growth is not a guy who knows how to make houses but only accepts a limited few 'apprentices' into the guild that produces them. It is when the knowledge required to make houses is distributed to everyone. It is bizarre to me that while our technology economy is based on the body of knowledge put together over centuries by others that we use for free, it has now become almost dominated by this notion that if I come up with an idea nobody else in the entire world should be able to use it but me for the next twenty years. I remember reading about how Jonny Ives felt Samsung had stolen time he could have spent with his family by infringing Apple patents. I just find this level of arrogance amazing. Sure, say they 'stole' billions of dollars from you and moan about that, but trying to elevate your ability to make rounded rectangles into some kind of Herculean sacrifice that can never be sufficiently rewarded, even with $100million in your bank account, just shows the problems our economy is going to face as technology becomes more important and those who own the rights to it become more intoxicated with their own egos. The heart of the equality argument in the face of automation is the ownership of knowledge. That is where we need to be looking for solutions.