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Robots Will Eliminate 6% of All US Jobs By 2021, Says Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars. The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of U.S. online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service. The report predicts there will be a net loss of 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025 -- 16% of U.S. jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created. The report forecasts 8.9 million new jobs in the U.S. by 2025, some of which include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators.
We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that. A participation rate at historic lows, and a U6 number which is people under employed or eligible workers who have stopped looking.
Is still at anemic highs. Unless we can improve overall educational achievements and skills for these alternative jobs. Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Smithers!
This will disproportionately affect minorities, especially blacks, who tend to work in jobs that are candidates for replacement by robots. This definitely is a racial issue, and it's really disappointing that a little extra profit is worth further disadvantaging minorities.
It's going to be grisly hell in those car manufacturing plants before they go back to flesh bag labor. But go back they will!
It's sad to watch division of labor and industrialization slowly deliver on its long standing promise: at last, having to work less and less for survival, and our society incapable of coping with that: no decent survival without a job (except for the small rich minority, that is).
We as a society need a plan for that, and those in power (or with near access to it) just keep repeating, sheepishly, the mantra "moar of the same".
Ideas?
Our new Robotic Overlords
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives.
And it's the same problem killed slavery.
Business falls off and you can simply lose the employee. A robot, well, the robot is still costing you money.
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet. Even if it was ready today (which it isn't) it would take a decade at minimum to roll it out. No business is going to throw out a perfectly functional truck to buy an expensive self driving truck just because one became available.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid. Siri can't even deal with very basic questions that any human would easily understand. And yet they are basically arguing that it will be a substitute for a human within 5 years? Not buying it outside of some corner cases. I can't imaging an automated attendant being able to deal with a screwed up credit card statement. And let's say that somehow they magically pull that trick off. They think that will replace 5%+ of the workforce in under 5 years? Hogwash. Just complete nonsense.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
Umm, what? Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars? That is the biggest hand waive I've seen in many a year. We've had Siri and similar technologies for about 5 years and they are no where close to being ready to replace humans in any meaningful numbers. And those technologies have essentially nothing to do with the technologies that would be involved in physical automation.
most of us will laugh at how wrong this article was.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs.
Sometimes they do but sometimes automation replaces skilled labor. To use a simple example, welding is a job that requires considerable skill and training to do well. You can replace a welder with a robot in cases where the economics make sense. You could in principle replace something like a radiologist with a computer program that reads xrays or replace a paralegal with an expert system. Vulnerability of a specific job to automation has less to do with skilled vs unskilled than it does the economics of that particular job. Automation comes into play when there are opportunities to decrease the unit cost of production. The limit on automation tends to be more economic than technical in a lot of cases.
Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that.
In the short run this will be true for any job at any time. The entire industrial revolution has been people being pushed from jobs that were no longer necessary into new ones. That's been a good thing for over 200 years and there is no reason to believe that it will cease being a good thing any time soon. Yes sometimes this involves some near term difficulty for some of the work force. In places like the US that have enjoyed higher than average incomes for several decades it might involve a reversion to the mean on incomes compared with global competitors.
Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Umm, why do you think this is something new? That has ALWAYS been the case.
Robots? 6%? Phhh. Small stuff.
100 years ago, tractors eliminated, like, 80%-90% of all US jobs.
Boy, I miss the farm. Plowing, hoeing, raking, weeding; day after day, year after year, endless hard manual labor. Yeah, those were the days....
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S.
No, you've got it wrong. They're going to eliminate 6% of all job seekers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
With the age of technology and robotics, a lot of cheap labor is on the horizon. If you aren't 100% confident that a robot could not do your job, then you may want to step up your game or find a different job/career.
In 2017 Genisys/Skynet will go live and robots will eliminate 95% of humans.
Same thing happened around 1980 when gas pump jockeys were replaced by gasoline vending machines. Being a gas station attendant used to be one of the main entry-level jobs available to young men.
"AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior" -- humans don't understand human behavior, even the ones who dedicate their lives to studying it. This sounds suspiciously naive to assert a tool can achieve its purpose when its creators do not understand the input.
The six percent will be freed up for other human work.
We won't have (a lot of) self-driving cars (that are actually allowed to be self-driving all the time) in 2021. That's four years away.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The US labour force will increase by 6% and provides increased GDP without the extra mouths to feed, infrastructure to support (roads, water, sewage), people to house, etc.
There's some value in that.
Never happened. True story.
the programmer's dilemma
first they came for the heavy labor jobs,
then they came for the repetitive jobs,
then they came for the unskilled jobs,
then they came for jobs replaced by a simple AI,
then the driving jobs,
then the jobs replaced by a complex AI,
then the lawyers,
then the architects,
then the managers,
then me.
You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.
Several responses to that. 1) None of that is going to happen within 5 years. We aren't even close technologically no matter what Elon Musk claims. 2) Even if the technology were ready today (which it isn't) it would take far longer than 5 years for it to roll out. A full rollout will cost hundreds of billions of dollars (probably trillions actually) and will take many years to accomplish. Economically it is going to take quite a long time to happen even if the technology is perfect from day one - which it won't be. 3) There are about 2.5-3 millions trucks that require a CDL on US roads (about 1.6 million tractor trailers). No more 800,000 are used for non-local operations. So no, you wouldn't eliminate even close to half of truck driving jobs even under the most idealistic assumptions just by somehow miraculously eliminating long haul trucking jobs.
I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2.
That is a FAR cry from chatbots actually replacing 6% of the workforce. We already have that today and if Siri and Cortana are indicators of state of the art, those call center jobs are safe for many years yet to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers....
I will never get into a self driving car, period. The article also talks about using AIs to deliver better customer service. I will not do business with a company that replaces human customer service workers with an AI unless I'm forced to for the simple reason that the AI is going to suck and not necessarily because it is a bad AI, but because it is going to stick rigidly to the corporate line, a bunch of profit motivated 'guidelines' set by some button clicking bean counter. Customer service AIs will be utterly inflexible when it comes to solving my problems whereas a human customer service worker is more likely to try and buck, weave and bend the rules to solve my issue.
EXTERMINATE!EXTERMINATE!
The whole stupid fucking article was a troll's excuse to throw that last line in. The world needs more "content curators" like it needs a new radical alternative to extremist Islam.
The article makes a lot of assumptions about security and reliability that it shouldn't. I see a very different future...
The doorbell rings, and itâ(TM)s the delivery of a new pair of running shoes, in the wrong size and in a style and color you hate. And you're a double amputee who doesn't have feet. Hereâ(TM)s the kicker: They were listed for $3,000 on eBay and you didnâ(TM)t order them. Your intelligent agent did after being hacked by the guy in Nigeria who placed the eBay listing.
But hey.. shipping was free, so at least you've got that going for you.
> The resources are best spent on the worthy - the One Percenters
The likes of Donald Trump?
When I look at how automated and how much code is generated by today's IDEs and languages with standard libraries for everything like Java, I look back on the days of coding all that database connectivity, network connectivity. guts of GUIs and other grunt work that I hated doing and say good riddance!
But, development teams back then were about a dozen people just to develop a distributed Windows or OS/2 system that can now be done with one guy - in about a day.
Seem to be in a repeat of the industrial revolution, going on now. We are seeing more machinery and jobs shifting from blue to white collar (last time it was agricultural to blue collar.). Increased immigration. There will be many effects in the end, but those unemployed workers won't stay that way forever because them newfangled machines put them out of work.
Will they replace hookers? They would probably be cleaner than real hookers.
Relevant: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/re...
Will we have flying cars too for all of this robotic automation? I seriously doubt it.
At best, we'll see maybe 1 or 2%. CSR jobs aren't going anywhere especially when people immediately hit "0" to speak to a real person. It'll take a lot more time to get self driving cars to become a real thing that don't crash or require a person to have constant attention to the road.
Robot exterminator at your service!
Maybe they can fix the re-posts, typos, and broken Unicode formatting!
Joseph Stiglitz has a theory (I think it has some merit, but probably not the full story) that it was such increases in farm productivity that lead to The Great Depression. Basically tractors destroyed the jobs, but people did not immediately move from the countryside into factories. This resulted in a collapse in demand and employment, the political consequences of which were the two world wars.
After the wars, he asserts that the mass mobilization of the economy towards industrial production created a new social order (middle class consumerism) that prevented the depression conditions from returning.
The follow on to this is that we are now entering an age where that industrial production model (people working in factories, labour being the constraint on output) is over, and that is why the economy is tanking again. If that is broadly correct, then the real question is what do we need to transition to next. I think that is a very interesting question. I imagine if you told someone in the 1930s who had been replaced by a tractor, that the future was the majority of workers being able to live like the richest of the day, they would have thought you were crazy.
The economy did find new jobs after the tractors turned up, but it was arguably a painful and difficult transition. I think we need to look more carefully into where we need to go and how we can do it, because the signs right now are that we are uncannilly repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, almost to a letter.
It seems people didn't get the sarcasm in your post. Or at least I hope it was sarcastic.
Different jobs - a hell of a lot of people used to work as telephone operators but as the world changed there were different jobs to do so there was not mass unemployment due to automated exchanges.
The "robots" have been there taking tens of thousands of jobs for decades but it didn't really matter in terms of the unemployment rate.
6% seems pretty pessimistic.
I bet if we raise the national minimum wage to $15/hour, we could hit 10% by 2021.
However, most of the low-skilled jobs are getting machined out of existence.
Demonstrably not true. WHICH jobs they do changes but there so far is no evidence of an end to low skill jobs. Unemployment rates are well within historical norms for all types of jobs even allowing for higher numbers of folks not actively looking. Which jobs low skilled people do is changing but they aren't going away. The problem they face is not automation but competition in a global market. If someone in china is willing to do the same job for half the price someone who hasn't learned any skills is going to have a hard time.
Even Chinese companies are moving towards robotics.
That's because Chinese wages are rising fast. It is exactly what you would expect to see happen. Automation makes sense once labor costs hit a certain tipping point for a given product. The average wage of a Chinese worker has been rising ridiculously fast so it should surprise no one that automation is starting to appear in places, specifically for high volume or high precision production. But China still has a labor surplus so jobs that would be automated in the US will not be automated anytime soon in China. Some business that formerly would have gone to China is not going elsewhere (like Vietnam) to places with lower wages. It's not a bad thing - it just means our friends in China are doing well for themselves.
We already see this in the U.S. Companies are complaining they cannot hire machinists or tool and die makers because those are not low skilled jobs any longer.
Speaking as someone who hires machinists semi-routinely, those NEVER were low skilled jobs. That is skilled labor and always has been. Perhaps you are confusing machinists with machine tenders (people that just load and unload parts). The reasons we sometimes have trouble in some places finding those people primarily is two fold. One is that in the US our education system tends to emphasize college instead of skilled trades and so their is in places a dearth of trained individuals. In places like Germany where trade schools are more well regarded this problem is substantially less. The second is that for certain labor intensive (as opposed to capital intensive) industries much of the labor has gone overseas. US manufacturing is alive and well but the sorts of products we make domestically are different than they were 40 years ago. That means the skill sets of the remaining machinists has had to shift somewhat. Some made the transition just fine, others not so much.
Now where I live (midwest) it isn't generally terribly hard to find a competent machinist. In other parts of the country it can be more challenging. Conversely where I live good programmers are a comparative rarity but in Silicon Valley you trip over them constantly. Various places enjoy a comparative advantage for particular skill sets.
Where they would have hired 5 workers in the past, they only need 1 to run the machines because the machines they use are so much more efficient now, but they also require higher skill levels
You don't work in a lot of machine shops do you? I have yet to be in a machine shop where one person is managing 5 busy machines simultaneously. Even two is often a stretch if they are reasonably busy. Machine shops where one person can juggle 5 machines are either doing parts with VERY long cycle times or the machine shop simply isn't very busy. Yes productivity has improved in manufacturing but let's not overstate how much.
Your argument sounds like the argument against cutting down a tree limb over a house. Gee, it's never fallen in the past 200 years, it won't fall now. Economic conditions fundamentally change over time.
Your argument presumes there is a tree there in the first place and I disagree with how you frame the is
Its circuits are running, its brain is alive,
Its flamethrower engines will light up the skies,
It's got rockets for fingers and lasers for eyes!
The US is likely to be in a better position to handle this.
Let's start with the point that "45% use the aforementioned digital concierges"... use and useful are two different standards. I have both an android and Iphone. The degree to which digital assistants are useful is not measurable. Speech recognition is too slow and error prone, it doen't interact with apps in a useful way, and tends to be more of a pain then it's worth - but yes, I try and do things with them once in a while just to reinvigorate my frustration with them.
Let's do a mental experiment - so you displace 30% of all workers... who's left with actual income to purchase the goods or services these robots provide?
With fewer and fewer able to pay, how do you cost justify the expense?
As the multitudes on public assistance swells due to all the displaced workers, how do you fund Governmental budgets?
Either globally the entire financial eco system evolves to socialism, or it collapses.
the cost of schooling needs to come down in the us. As who to dump 2-4 years + 20K-60K to get new skills. Or take out an 40K-60K+ loan that can't be discharged?
Unfortunately, software (including Cortana, Siri et. al.) will never be capable of operation outside if the bounds of mathematics thereby rendering itself inherently incapable of many things. This is what is known as a hype cycle. Repetitive tasks based on previous input can be carried out by machine intelligence, the rest, not so much. Those involved in strictly logic based or repetitive pursuits (actually a small percentage) will face replacement, but that's really just a further evolution of the industrial age. Silicon valley and their pie in the sky, sci-fi notions of technology that doesn't actually exist are really just an example of ignorance paired with wealth running rampant, and that will bear itself out in real world use. It cracks me up that so many of them refer to humanity as a 'bug' when their own human fallacies and human delusions of omnipotence/omniscience cripple them as badly as other people's foibles. Pbbbbbttt. Whatever.
just wait for the world needs ditch diggers too to die off. It was a good job now not as much and you need the skills to run the backhoe / other equipment.
Just wait for that to be automated / cut down to 1 spotter / remote controller. At least building the auto drive stuff may let them have an small boom of a lot of work to do.
In the past, technology was used to make workers more productive, and thus more valuable.
Now they're creating technology to make sure workers are obsolete.
This is what happens when people are made obsolete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obsolete_Man
This is a first. There's never been a situation previously where a significant (and likely unlimited and continuously, and rapidly, growing) wave of higher-qualified workers who did not require wages entered the workforce.
Workers that never cheat, never steal, are never late, very rarely "sick", have no unions, no wages, no insurance, no internecine or even trivial conflict, are unfailingly polite, are immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment, have no interest in and do not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and are replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous "employee" to the door.
Whatever ideas you have of re-employment absorbing the displaced workers need to factor in all of the above.
Here's how it'll go: as soon as the cost of putting automation in place drops below the cost of keeping a human in place, the human will lose their job. The only way to slow this down is to artificially raise the price of letting the human go, which has very rigid practical limits related to cost of product and the nature of competition and will consequently peter out very quickly in any case where it is attempted. Transition to this brand new form of automation will naturally tend to accelerate to whatever degree said automation can be made more sophisticated. That, at present, is looking quite open-ended. If that's true — and we have no significant reason to think it isn't at this time — then the entire process is also open-ended.
At some point in such a process, society will have to formally change its economic structure. This is for the simple reason that large numbers of unemployed citizens will eventually constitute a critical mass of opinion and potential independent action. Either that, or the displaced workers and therefore the cost of supporting them will have to be outright eliminated from society. There are no other paths. Something will have to be done to effectively deal with the former workers. Currently, there is no such accommodating mechanism in place. The closest thing to it is the Basic Income idea; but as yet, that's not a government process, at most it represents tiny experiments, and usually nothing more than unimplemented ideas entirely within the bounds of citizen groups.
Those that persist in viewing this particular technology as highly similar to previous introductions of machinery are not going to be able to anticipate the changes that are coming. It's inevitably going to be a very challenging time for society, and a very, very ugly time for many individuals until the economic and social structures can effectively deal with a non-working populace.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Once the permanently unemployed reach around 20%-25% of the general population, there will be one of the four possibilities, and/or a combination of them:
1. A Universal Basic Income to enable an existence just above grinding poverty for those who are unemployable.
2. Civil unrest not seen since the 1960s.
3. "Camps" to house and "manage" those unemployable and homeless with no other recourse. They will be managed and monitored by the same AI/Digital Assistants/Robots who displaced them.
4. A totalitarian state(also ran by AI/Digital Assistants/Robots) to manage the situation.
And you thought we had a lot to worry about with Climate Change, Islamic Extremism, Zika, Russian Hackers, The Refugee Crisis and Wealth Inequality...
Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars
All this time, it's Siri this, and Siri that, and she was effectively mis-directing us... ...when quietly, without much fanfare, in walks Siri's gun-toting, beer guzzling, spawn of Satan,Siri's jealous ax-and-batleth-wielding ex-boyfriend Bender!
He will take the rest of us out, only so that the 6%
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
BULLSHIT.
So-called 'self-driving, autonomous cars' will still not be anywhere near ready for day-to-day public use in five years. Period. Even if by some unbelievable miracle they were, you'd have to be fucked in the head to step into the back seat of a motor vehicle that has no human driver safeguarding your life.
Motor vehicles will always continue to be required to have a full set of manual controls for a human operator, and a fully and properly trained, tested, licensed, and insured human operator will always be required to be behind the wheel at all times. I've said it countless times before, and I'll continue to say it. Until IF and WHEN we have so-called 'artificial intelligence' that is at LEAST the equal in all ways to the human mind, so-called 'machine intelligence' will NOT be allowed sole control of a motor vehicle, there will ALWAYS need to be a human in control at all times. We don't even have a CLUE yet how our own consciousness and self-awareness works, just some half-baked theories, and some half-baked, if clever, software that mimicks some few aspects of how cognition works. If you believe otherwise about any of this then you're sadly misinformed and have been drinking the same kool-aid that the media has been drinking. Bottom line: Don't surrender your drivers license yet, you're still going to need it for the rest of your life.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Unless some sort of bridge system is brought out in parallel to this automation drive, you're going to have massive unemployment of a particularly vulnerable class of worker. In addition, automating things further up the education ladder is going to lead to a lot of moderately-educated people, who may have borrowed heavily to get that education, with nothing to do and no way to make enough money to see an ROI.
I just have trouble seeing what _most_ typical corporate workers might end up doing. I've said this before, but if you're in IT, take a look at the people you support. Most of them are doing a more automated version of jobs that existed 40 years ago -- collect work from input stack, perform process on it, place it on the output stack. The only difference is that the paper documents are usually emails and Word docs now. And all those corporate jobs now pretty much require a 4-year degree. There are so many generic business majors from random state universities filling these spots, getting good salaries, buying houses, buying cars, paying taxes and reproducing. What happens to the economy when all that economic activity gets severely curtailed? The free market devotees say that the supply and demand curves will adjust, but how happy do you think society will be on 10% of their former salary? Look at Trump, he says things that should really set off some alarm bells, but he does it for shock value because he knows his target audience is upset about their lot in life and scared for the future. When 80-90% of the population is like that, I wonder what will happen.
There can only be so many "International YouTube Celebrities" and I think it's dangerous to suggest that everyone has the entrepreneurial skills to go out and open up a random business. Look at all the wasted effort and money poured into failed businesses. I've seen lots of people forced into early retirement and tricked by a franchisor to blow what retirement savings they had on opening a Subway or whatever, then lose everything. I do think we have to find something for people to do that has a similar level of skill to what we're replacing -- I just don't know what it is yet.
We have already replaced customer service agents with robots.... Call your local telephone or cable company. You don't get connected to a human, but an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR). Now if you're saying that the IVR can figure out every single possible problem that you can possibly have with your service or billing, that's pretty amazing. I don't think the IVR will be able to figure out what to do when you call and tell it that your cable box is oozing blood and your TV keeps showing a video of a creepy long-haired girl crawling out of a well.
We've had 40 years of increasing worker productivity with ownership keeping 100% of the proceeds.
What's the old saw about Moore's law?
"If cars had improved as much as CPUs, you'd have a VW with the horespower of the Queen Mary that ran a million miles on a thimbleful of gas".
If management had shared 50% of the gains from automation with workers, we'd all work a 5 hour week and make a million dollars a year.
...robots and AI individuals to start paying their fair share of taxes.
They do not have Driverless Planes and Trains yet. But Trucks and cars will be perfected in 4 years. Once that white sky / with truck issue was solve it was simple.
Why should an loan with no collateral be allowed to be discharged?
...my God given right to Profit!!!
I agree it could be one of multiple factors. The bank bubble of the 1920's could have temporarily masked the brewing problem. When the crash happened, the problem became naked.
Societal transformations caused by technological change don't always progress smoothly. If you've been farming all your life, moving to the city to put widgets into gadgets on an assembly line may be too big a life change later in life such that you choose to battle it out with the remaining farmers instead, giving you and the other farmers less income, depressing the economy, or at least tilting it in destabilizing ways.
Table-ized A.I.
More typically, they surface as increases in the wealth of the 1% and corresponding increases in financial influence on politicians and regulators that tilt the playing field ever more towards that 1%.
There are exceptions, particularly in computing technology. But generally speaking, almost anyone with a blue-collar job used to be able to afford a decent house, a car, an education, and a stay-at-home spouse. That's no longer typical. That's your blazing red flag, right there. It speaks the truth louder than anything else. The fact that someone has a very powerful computer in their phone won't do much, if anything, to enable the owner buy that house, or stay at home to raise their 1.88 children at the same level as was previously possible. Real income has not kept pace with real costs — and that's pretty much the deciding factor, right there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Machines will one day exceed human intelligence. - Ray Kurtzweil
Only if we meet them halfway. - David Snowden
Looks like in 'Murica 6% of employment requirements have been dumbed down to the point where people are no longer required to think and act intelligently. Does that mean that our expectations of a functioning society have also been dumbed down proportionately? Are well all being gradually turned into mindless automaton consumers?
The summary says "Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual". Now lets talk about media viewing history, in particular Netflix. The movies Netflix recommended to me based on my viewing history were, most of the time, not what I wanted. It is applying macro statistical techniques to a micro scenario, not taking into account the subjective taste of the individual. Yes you could say that over time, with more data points, it would get it "right", but an infinite number of monkeys each with a typewriter can in theory write a classic piece of literature, but that's not "intelligence", that's trial and error. If the said Netflix algorithm(s) that recommends movies based on my viewing history was truly "intelligent" (like its depicted in pop culture (e.g. sci-fi, video games etc.) and this summary, it would get it "right" after, at most, several attempts.
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
Let's assume for the sake of argument that new automation becomes cheaper and more effective than 70% of the human workforce.
They can't work, but they can still vote.
What kind of government are they going to elect?
a. One that lets the free market (now featuring very low demand for human labor) deprive them of any way of obtaining the necessities of life?
Or
b. a government that forces re-distribution of a good chunk of the financial proceeds of the automated economy?
And if you try to disempower democratic government before this can happen...
Do we get a small cadre of libertarians, with their automation-fed bank/bitcoin accounts, protected by a robot army, surrounded by a horde of the zombie unemployed?
Sounds like a good video game actually.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I always find these prediction kinda bogus...
What I often see in predictions of robots eliminating part of the workforce is that it's talking about potential, not factuality.
It's either new trends arising in automated systems that could POTENTIALLY take some jobs on the area they were designed for, or a prediction that automation usage in areas that technology already exists for will keep rising exponentially without much consideration on scale, costs, and how much it'd take for those automation systems to actually be produced.
Lets put this in practical terms - I don't see many people firing secretaries only because they learned how to use Siri, Cortana, Alexa or Google Now. Those systems are capable of bringing information faster, as well as making it easier to fill up a schedule and stuff... but they are not capable of taking calls, acting as intermediate to solve problems, pay the bills, negotiate timelines and whatnot. And I'm not sure if 10 years will be enough to remove the human component there.
The same thing was said when these automated call systems came up, and they replaced nothing... just made costumers mad about not having someone on the other side of the line, to the point it's being prohibited for some services.
Unlike technology, humans are kinda slow to adopt new things, and they do it in a non-uniform way. So it's much like landlines and fax machines around the world... you still have plenty of countries that are still dependant on those because local communities haven't move on just yet.
Same could be said for automated car systems. If all goes well, I expect that we have part of the fleet in some cities replaced by them in 10 years or so... but it won't happen all at once, and it won't affect everyone.
And then, of course, these predictions always have a pessimistic outlook on job creation. Somehow, I don't think human societies are stagnant like that. Someone in the last days of the industrial era surely predicted that computers were going to do everything in the next century or so, and that there would be no jobs left for everyone. Much like the Internet create tons upon tons of jobs, several of them that people in the Industrial Era never could have predicted, I have a feeling that when we effectively enter a robotic + automation era, the opportunity for other types of unforeseen jobs will open up.
Finally, I also think that for some stuff robots will never be able to replace us because of the human to human interaction factor. Even though there's a whole lot more we can do efficiently without pesky meat sacks in the middle of it, I imagine that at some point in some areas we'll slowly find out that human interaction is needed - not because of efficiency, not because we can do better than robots, but mostly because of how we feel about it.
Automate enough people out of jobs and you'll destroy capitalism in the US. Once enough people are not able to find work, you're going to have to support them or be overtly for the mass death of your own neighbors. The 0.1% will not survive this unscathed by economic policy. Eventually enough people will be pissed off to the point of voting for socialism since those who run the business are making it impossible for the former employed to live.
Sure I could have my robots feed and clothe the poor, but why waste the cycles when instead I'll just use them to keep the smelly bums off my property.
Capitalism relies on a basic priniciple that all actors have needs that outweigh supply. As an employee I need to have more work than I have employees to hire more employees. I need raw resources to be abundant enough to be cost effective for me to build my product/service. As an employee I need to have a larger desire to have money to be conivnced to work. The amount I get paid also has to be at a level to afford a life style that I'm OK enough with to spend X hours working for someone to do. As a consumer the product has be priced at such a price to be affordable.
Automation is making it so that, as an employer. At some point automation will make it so that I won't need to hire people as I simply won't have enough work to justify hiring them. As material sciences advance the materials the machines are made out of will become more robust, needing less maintanence, and simplier to repair/replace. This completely fractures on of the core pillarstones of capitalism and leads to the employee segment becoming significantly weaker. In turn this means that consumers (who are, largely, the same people as employee class) will have less money and in turn that will force employers to do more to minimize costs.
At some point the capitalist economic system cannot sustain itself. It may happen in 50 years or 500, but I cannot see how it won't happen.
I've been looking for a moisture vaporator programmer ever since my last droids buggered off. Even the robots are scared of hard work :(
Not that I am disagreeing with the basic premise, but out of curiosity, what was Forrester's prediction in 2011 for today (2016)? Would just like to score their track record.
I don't mind getting replaced by a robot, but only if I get PAID for it.
if companies are using robots to cut out the middle man, with no pay, then fuck them.
Maybe this only takes the beginning of the curve into account. Overall, I would expect more like 20% in th next 10 years and 50-70% long-term.
Now, the way to deal with this is not to try and stop it (because that is futile), the way is to find other methods to distribute the wealth society has.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The major decrease in the top 10 of jobs forecast was for Computer Programmers.
Obviously we need to cease issuing H1-B visas for anyone with that occupation.
Today.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I never really counted them before...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
when robot took your job. We all know if this happened too fast, we'll enter another great depression. But on the bright side, it means we'll have weird jobs as the norm if it happened slowly. Hackers and security expects will be in the new high. Researchers will be the new future. One in a thousand creator will be the new star. Part-time lab experimenters will be the commons. Except for rural farmers,...who will still be farming.
I would have expected it to be much much higher.
Don't forget the extent of the jobs that will get replaced, including journalists that write summaries of other people's events and original content.
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/17/135471975/robot-journalist-out-writes-human-sports-reporter
While things never go smoothly or resources shared wisely, we are on the verge of affordable mass human access to outer space. This means access to huge amounts of raw material and energy. And, lots of places to go and things to do! Details can be debated, timelines may shift a bit. But, the process has begun...
... reduce the retirement age and work week hours. Add Election Day in the fall and another federal holiday in the spring or winter.
Pay for it be removing the upper limit for social security collections and a carbon fee and dividend program.
suffering from pronoia