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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.
I love the way you simply dismiss that "brief period of adjustment", as if it's simply nothing.
50 years ago, technology replaced a lot of farm workers. We pushed for more humans to obtain education and learn a skill related to technology in order to move on and survive. Today we are finding that technology is being used to replace technology so there are not too many other avenues to turn down or even invent for humans to actually go DO. Robots will build the PC you work on, displacing thousands of jobs. Automation will build and control the car you used to have to drive, displacing thousands of jobs. Drones will deliver all of your sustenance to you, displacing thousands of jobs. AI can and will start replacing teachers, displacing thousands of jobs. Without teachers, you really don't need an army of redundant management, displacing thousands of jobs. (wait, what exactly are we teaching humans to go DO in the future? Uhhh...)
Even something as simple as helping humans communicate with each other will be displaced by the electronic babel fish.
And before we start rambling on about the technology disrupters of yesteryear, buggy whip manufacturers being made obsolete cannot even remotely compare to replacing teachers all over the world. And do not dismiss the speed at which disrupters are coming. Apple's Siri is not even five years old today, and Tesla's all-electric supercars aren't even a decade old yet.
I should note that these coming innovations are not necessarily a bad thing. Humans have a finite amount of time to live (at least as it stands now), so it becomes rather pointless to force a human to drone on for 80% of their life working WAY more hours than humanly necessary. That said, society is not even remotely prepared, and will continue to champion the broken concept that humans must work 40 hours a week doing SOMETHING, else they are considered lazy and non-essential.
Oh, and let me remind you as to what this generation considers "productive human effort". We pay YouTube stars six figures and the Kardashians are worldwide celebrities compared to royalty. I wouldn't exactly label abject narcissism as something that should CREATE wealth or hold value in the future.