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Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
szczys writes: There was a video published on YouTube about a year ago called Humans Need Not Apply which compared human labor now to horse labor just before industrialization. It's a great thought-exercise, but there are a ton of tasks where it's still science-fiction to think robots are taking over anytime soon. Kristina Panos makes a great argument for which jobs we all want to see taken by robots, others that would be very difficult to make happen, and some that would just creep everyone out.
there are still some out there?
...then it will be automated somehow, eventually.
This is why you go to school and get a good education, so you can get a job that can't be replaced by a robot. Personally if a robot can do a job quicker, cleaner and more efficiently, fire the humans and roll in the robots :D
Yet, horses didn't become extinct. Not in the slightest. We still have _LOTS_ of horses around here. Some farms still use them for horsepower - it's a personal preference. Many people use them for pleasure. They're better off than they were before - more pampered. Soon you like the horse will be just a pleasure item for your robot overlords and happier for that.
There's jobs? Great! I was worried that the 5,000,000,000 work-aged people in the 99% would struggle to find things the 1%'ers want done. Apparently each rich guy needs a city-sized army of artists and musicians for each of their mansions.
It's hilarious to see people in denial about this coming to a head, when it's long since started.
Bobby McGuy is 18 and trying to pay for school instead of suckering into the predatory scam of student loans, because he knows he's fucked if he doesn't get exclusive education (which, by definition, not everyone can have). He's healthy, ready to work, an optimized subject on a silver platter, and there's nothing for him to do unless he undercuts the robot's $2/hr. He's worthless. If, IF there's anything for him to do, 4,999,999,999 others want to do it too.
Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
So, what are the other ones doing? Sneaky bastards.
-Dave
Last I looked plumbers still make more than doctors.
I keep hearing this, but all the data I can find does plumbers making on average ~$60k and general practitioners ~$140k.
Consider that if everyone has a robot, that you could get your robot to make things for you rather than buy them.
Here you say "but what about chemicals and compounds"... all of that can be automated.
People in cities might be fucked. I don't know... they can live it up with Judge Dredd in Mega City 1. But people with some land might be able to enjoy a modern high tech life style and produce most of what they want and need independently.
3d printers... CNC machines... that magnetic auto refinery/chemical plant/bio sample handler... there are a lot of things you could make with that. And those things you made could make pretty much anything else and so on.
Keep in mind, everything we have today from satellites to submarines was built with human hands... or built with things built by human hands.
We could see a democratization of industry in the same way that computers have democratized a lot of things.
Rather than wondering if you'll have a job... consider if you'll even need one. Why do you have the job? To make the money to get the things you buy with the money. What if you could just skip that middle step and go right to the end?
You might say "this thing I want isn't practical to build that way"... maybe... but also consider that you might build things differently if your industrial model were different.
Consider how things were made 30 thousand years ago. Pretty much all we have from that period are "hand axes"... bits of stone chipped into sharp shapes... or smooth rocks used as hammers.
Look at how things were made in every era from then to now. The way they're made and the way people thought about the things they made changed from one era to the next. That relationship between the thing, what it is meant to do, who made it, and how society sees the person that made it influences the thing that is made.
A skilled craftsman in the 1700s is not going to make something the same way that an assembly line worker will in 1938. And just the same, a person that instructs his machinery to build him a whatever that he wants is not going to build it the same way that assembly line worker would either.
the great take away many people have with this is that we should just get welfare and have the big government or corporations pay us for breathing. The reality is that if the industrial complex doesn't need us then it doesn't need us. You might think you can vote yourself some political power but if you provide nothing the society actually needs... then why does the society need to care what you want? Your vote won't matter.
So you had better hope you're better than just a welfare sink. Because if that's all 80 percent of humanity becomes... then 80 percent of humanity is expendable. I'm not saying I'd kill them off... I'm saying someone will do it though. And when it happens... those that do it will lose nothing when they do it because the people they're killing are of no value at all to the society.
So pray you're not as useless as some would suggest. Because if you are... you might just be the walking dead.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
with modern militaries and information control? Also, if you look at history it's really only happened once when FDR and a few others broke ranks among the 1%, and even then it took the loss of life after WWII trimming excess population plus an irrational fear of communism to get the 1% of open up their coffers. They're over that fear and they're not bothering with large scale wars anymore. Hell, back around 2000 a bunch of Pakistani terrorists attacked India's capital, there was strong evidence the Pakastani gov't knew about it (maybe bullshit, but still) and there was _still_ no war.
/. jokes). Seriously, about the only thing that makes the bastards in our ruling class treat us well is if there isn't enough of us. That's why the chruches say no to birth control. They've long since noticed the drop in happiness that happens after childbirth for all but the richest and they'll be damned if we're gonna stop giving them fodder for their factories...
I don't see us throwing off the yolk of oppression with violent revolution ever again. If there's any hope it's male birth control and a general lack of interest in having children that'll do it (queue
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That's one of the big problems with college loans: they'll give you 100k for a career path with no clear ability to pay back that cost in a reasonable timeframe (say, 5 years). If you took out a $100k to get a music degree, an education degree, a social sciences or philosophy or religion degree there's no way that's going to pay off in a reasonable period. Chemical engineering? Yeah. MD or JD? Yup. Accounting - maybe.
If, all of a sudden there were no loan guarantees and banks based loans on actual salaries and job prospects, you'd find that your max loan amounts would be in the 0.8-1.2x starting annual salary range, and there would be whole degree types that would be simply ineligible.
And when nobody had (seemingly) free money to go to school, those colleges would find a way to reduce costs and tuition for the non-money jobs. Or they'd drop the programs entirely and the supply would be reduced until there were a decent salary for those left.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
With a (redacted) marketshare we need to (redacted). Putting up more barriers will just have them ignore the US entirely.
It wouldn't be that bad of a disaster, as not all companies could afford to leave. Others would find themselves on the painfully wrong end of some products delivered by more US-friendly peers.
By leaving the US, they would be signing their own death warrants. Embracing the US and her citizens would preserve their existence and remove any reason for hostility.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
For those eager to remove jobs with AI/tech, consider that all the bread, circuses, and such will not stop a critical mass of displaced individuals.
The result will be a large reversal of technological progress, most of which would have been avoided by reintegrating displaced individuals.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But one could see the car industry as a likely source of new jobs to replace the horse jobs. We don't have anything equivalent in proportion.
A robot may replace 10 jobs for every 1 bot repair or design job it creates. (And they may soon be able to fix themselves.) Houston, we have a ratio problem. As somebody pointed out, industrial-age improvements magnified human ability, rather than outright replaced humans.
Perhaps we are just not spotting the new replacement jobs equivalent to horse-to-cars, but after bringing up this issue many times, nobody else has spotted it either.
Let's see if 20 years from now we slap ourselves on the forehead and say, "There it is, the Magic Gap! So obvious in hindsight, how could I be so dense! We are all.....belly dancers!"
Table-ized A.I.
To paraphrase a line from The Incredibles, "When everyone is college educated - no one will be."
I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect of living in a world where you'll need a 4 year college degree to bag groceries, because everyone in the transportation industry was put out of work by self-driving vehicles and drones. From the looks of things, we're not even that far off.
^ Wish I could upvote you, that is 100% true... and so many people don't get it... you can't give EVERYONE a college education and expect it to mean anything...
Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
Right. The rest are coming to kill us!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
from TFA:
We may be a reckless and hedonistic species, but weâ(TM)re not going to replace ourselves into extinction. Thatâ(TM)s just silly. Someone still has to design robots, train them, fix them, and streamline their processes.
Firstly, human being do a lot of silly things. Saying something is silly means absolutely nothing on the axis of "likely to happen".
Secondly, I see nothing that prevents robots in principle from designing, training or fixing other robots. In fact, we already have most of the components for such things in place.
What robots can't do, at this time, is to decide about purpose. They can do things, and even figure out better ways of doing them by themselves, and very soon they will be able to decide independently what to do in order to reach a given goal. But the goal-giving is still human.
But, I don't think that's a god-given. Where do our goals from? They're basically just what's bubbling up from this sea of desires, interests and good old instincts. The ultimate goal is a question as old as mankind, and as silly. We don't have a goal, really. What we consider goals and purposes are just higher-level to-do items, and a sufficiently complex computer program can come up with equivalent things, in principle.
So in summary, we very much may replace ourselves into extinction. And on some level, we even need to do it. Our biological machine is as primitive and flawed as it is beautiful and brilliant. The same will be true for machines we design, but with self-replicating machines, the evolutionary cycles can be much faster in the same way that language and writing have dramatically increased the speed at which we humans develop compared to animals who only have genetics to pass on whatever they learnt.
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People tend to overestimate the 'thought' that goes into their jobs.
Let me just preface this and say that there are people in each job that really do put some unique thought into things. But for a general practitioner of a problem and for 90% of cases, you'd be surprised how far following routine steps takes you.
I remember the first time this happened (probably about 10 years ago), I was working for a firm and they were embracing wikis and other such tools. My manager asked me to write down our trouble shooting steps in a wiki. See this line in the logs or these symptoms, and follow these steps. I kind of surprised myself how I reduced one of my great assets to something a person could follow steps on a wiki. Obviously if a new symptom showed up, not all the steps would be there. What I mean is that before there would be a problem and it would me to the rescue. Most people didn't even know where to start. Kudos to me! I realized, I just outlined the steps that most people could now follow.
You'll see similar things in other fields. Family medicine for example is one. The way most of them operate today, it is rather like an algorithm. Again, some really good doctor who spends huge time with his patients and learns all their history and quirks... might be better, but the medical care most of us receive (I'm in Canada, not sure of your countries experience) is just in and out. I have some friends who are doctors and they basically tell me the same thing. They take in the symptoms, assume it is a common ailment, order tests... if anything is weird... refer to a specialist.
I'm actually seeing more and more of the doctors 'thought' automated. I get a routine prescription based on a blood test. Today, it's all automated. Blood test results come back to the dr with ministry guidelines on what is abnormal (refer to specialist) and any dosage levels. I have little doubt most of this work about be automated. Perhaps overseen by a nurse or something just for oversight. Or approvals from a doctor if a high risk treatment is needed or something. But again, like 90% of cases can be automated.
You see the same thing in the financial industry. Are there people who can manage money really well. Probably. But they tend to stick with high net worth people or institutions. The average person gets dumped into a general mutual fund. Today, so much of it is automated by algorithms and you might as well just buy an ETF.
Even something like teaching. Do you ever wonder why teacher still write their own lesson plans? I did when I was a teacher. Are kids that unique in every class? That whole process can be automated and shared. Theoretically teachers should be assessing each student and customizing things... but that was not the reality in the classroom. Much like family doctors. There is a theoretical advantage in personalized service, but not much in practice.
So if you can get an automated system to do 90% of job, that saves a boat load of money and ensures consistency. If you're a nice institution, you can take those savings and really help the ones in need. Get rid of the higher requirements for teachers. Hire people to basically ensure classroom behavior. For example, if most of the students can be dealt with via automated lessons/tests... then more resources and attention can be given to children with issues.
It's rarely about a computer automating all of the job, but doing 90% of it. Humans can still be there for special cases, but again... that's much fewer jobs or jobs that should get much lower pay if they're just overseeing.