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Drones Could Replace $127 Billion Worth Of Human Labor (businessinsider.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: A new report from PwC finds that drones could replace $127 billion worth of human labor and services across several industries. Infrastructure and agriculture make up the largest chunks of the potential value -- some $77.6 billion between them -- including services like completing the last mile of delivery routes and spraying crops with laser-like precision. Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades. Drones are a cheap, versatile first step toward that future. According to the new PwC report, they're also a solid cost-cutting measure. Along with infrastructure and agriculture, drones will help tech giants like Amazon deliver packages, allow security companies to better monitor their sites, help producers and advertisers to film projects, allow telecommunication firms to easily check on their towers, and give mining companies a new way to plan their digs.
It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!
And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Just once I'd like to see a technological revolution where the CEOs are replaced by technology *before* the labor pool.
You won't see robots outlawed until robots start replacing lawyers. Lawyers tend to control the law in their favor, so, once you have technology replacing lawyers, that's when the revolution really comes.
But I always find it funny that technology replaces every person, except the most useless person in the entire organization, and that's the overpaid, underworked CEO who's only concern about the company is what the stock price is at that very second.
Half of the CEOs in this country can't even tell you what their company *does* -- and yet they get paid more than the entire labor force of the company combined; and continually look for ways to increase their income while decreasing the income of everyone else.
Replace CEOs with a chatbot that can play golf, and you'll notice no difference in the running of the firm. And save million of dollars in compensation.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
When we no longer need very much productive human effort? What happens to the ditch diggers when they're obsolete? If you're OK with them starving to death in a gutter then man up and say so, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done any less. You can't become the next Einstein just by wanting too and working hard no matter what movie montages told you. In the real world people have limits, and we've got billions of them on they're way to planned obsolescence and mass starvation.
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Like what? I'd like examples of something that is not at risk of automation and/or offshoring. Programming and managing server farms can and is being offshored. As soon as you reach a certain age, corporations toss you in the trash like a 90's PC found in the closet anyhow. They don't value IT skills enough to keep you past Logan's Run age, so why should that be considered the safe haven from change?
I agree one has to be adaptable these days just to stay in the game, but it appears to be a race to the bottom, to borrow a popular phrase.
If everybody OD'd on caffeine and worked 70 hours a week to "keep up", that's just more intensity chasing a fixed number of positions. It don't see enough slots for each person even if everybody were super smart and super competitive and super-caffeinated.
3rd-world countries subsidize labor to keep their citizens from rioting and overthrowing the leaders. They are thus de-facto slaves. Do we have to turn our country into a 3rd-world dump to compete with 3rd-world dumps and slaves via deregulation and pollution? That's solving the wrong problem: our goal should be a better society, not a society where we compete with subsidized slaves wallowing in gunk by becoming slaves wallowing in gunk.
Table-ized A.I.