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Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Is Going To Decimate Middle Class Jobs (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive." He frames this economic anxiety as a reason for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent." Combined with other issues -- overpopulation, climate change, disease -- we are, Hawking warns ominously, at "the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity." Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges, he says.
We get it Stephen, you've got an opinion on everything. Why exactly do we keep treating yours as definitive when it's clear you're way out of your expertise?
Oh, BeauHD. It all makes sense now.
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Now we just need to fund PMCs to keep the starving masses under control.
I'm a programmer.... they cant program themselves....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hawking really oughta stick to science and stay away from politics.
...by killing off humanity.
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
If people don't work, they can't afford to buy things. So who is going to buy the things that get created? Robots?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It makes no sense. Just because you can do work differently does not mean there is less work to do. For crying out loud, most of the world would be happy to be as rich as a poor American. FFS.
Ok, look, he's probably correct, but why are we so hung up on a theoretical physicist's input?
Obligatory XKCD.
"Secretary" used to be the most common job according to some interpretations of BLS reports. The Word Processor made that role largely obsolete and now self-service:
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
So nowadays it's "Truck Driver"... wait a bit longer until autonomous vehicles make those delivery jobs go away. Wouldn't call those middle-class jobs, though.
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
I'll chalk this up as a poor interpretation of what constitutes 'middle class.' Most of the jobs automation would impact might creep into the low end of that range, but not very many.
However, as the wealth disparity widens and more automation in general comes into common use we will eventually have to find a solution. Guaranteed Income and the like may not be the right answer, though it's certainly the common thought right now. We definitely have to look into the issue further.
Me thinks Stephen is feeling the tap of the Reaper at his door, and is projecting his feelings of anxiety outwards (happens to the best of us). The only difference between him, and your grandparents, is that he has access to a public circuit.
AI will take ALL jobs.
And it's going to be awesome.
We have already seen the results of automation in many areas. The more automation in the supply chain, the cheaper things get. Eventually, it gets to the point where everything is free. Every person will have their own robot (army) that can procure or make anything they could ever want. They will be able to do this because they will be more intelligent than every human who has ever lived put together, and more, think millions or billions of times faster than us. They won't "take over" because they don't have traits like "hunger for power" or "boredom" built in because those are evolutionary short cuts to get you more mates. Instead, they will want nothing more than to satisfy your values.
Remember to always look on the bright side of life.
Not being able to live, is.
In a perfect world, no one would HAVE to work if there was a minimum support for everyone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with machines doing more and more mundane work. The problem is that the increased profit goes to the wrong people.
It will eventaully take all of the jobs and human will excting in a natural process because becoming life-wise useless.
There is also a possibility that human will become a part of the machine.
Best regards.
I will only use technology from the 20teens. No more than 8 cores. 4g is enough gs. No robots more complex than a roomba. We are but a simple people. Now excuse me, I am late to a McMansion raising. Tis a gift to be simple.
Maybe he already has and we're actually just listening to his wheelchair.
Sure he's pretty smart in a specific field but who gives a s*** what he says about Automation and AI?
He's no more an expert in those subjects than pretty much any other Joe on the street.
-Styopa
....That Started Several Decades Ago" for five-hundred, Alex!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I am honored the Mr. Hawking agrees with me as I have ranted about this for a couple of years now. In the US the solution is social and legal changes taking place at a faster rate than automation. Putting a dullard in the White House is exactly 100 % backwards in that regard. We have before us a strong proof that capitalism is not a system that is fit to survive. Many of our moral and ethical codes are also unfit. For example, the idea that people have a duty to support themselves is backwards. It will no longer be possible to work for a living. Further, ever higher population numbers means less and less freedom for individuals. For those that don't understand that reason it out this way. You enjoy playing your tuba. You have a tiny 5 acre pot of land and your music never reaches your neighbors when you play your tuba. Now imagine you are in an apartment house surrounded with units right at hand. Now your tuba playing will be restrained by your neighbors or the building management. Your freedoms are lessened by the size of the population near you.
Because the public does not believe or want to believe these things, no politician dare address the real problems and the problems get worse and worse. Now the Trumpenstein monster will do nothing but make it worse. He is not mentally able to foresee what will occur.
We've been there before. Every time there is an innovation in infrastructure, it brings about those who profit from it and those who lose the work of supporting the obsolete (or less essential) infrastructure. It also decimates those who were doing hard work which was trivialized by the new infrastructure.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Hawking wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing". Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate", he's right.
Automation HAS reduced the proportion of people who work in manufacturing, after it did the same in agriculture. That's happening now, just as it's been happening for 250 years. There was a time when most people worked to produce food and other necessary agricultural products. Automation by machines such harvesters meant that people could stop spending their time trying to produce enough food and move to building convenience items, such as dishwashers, electrical ovens, etc. They could also spend much more time doing R&D to invent radio, TV, airplanes, etc. Once we had machines doing the physical manufacture of products, we spent our time creating an entire new sector of the economy; neither agriculture, manufacturing, nor service. Humans started spending our time creating the *information* sector, building web pages, etc. I'm excited to see what we create next, and I'm glad I don't have to till the field today.
Economic expansion has always been principally ultimately limited by available human labor. As we are able to automate more and more fundamental types of work, the more we will migrate ultimately to a resource bottlenecked economy. Ultimately humans will not be needed for the mechanics of production. This is a very good thing, but it does make capitalism obsolete at some point.
In the near future nobody will be driving anymore, certainly not truck drivers, in that industry, drivers *alone* is 3.5 million jobs. Driving is a pretty high level task, if that can be automated, there's all kinds of manual labor tasks that also will be. The point here is that even with technology we have now or almost have now there is absolutely no way large numbers of people will be able to find work in fields that are not themselves soon to be impacted by automation in a similar way.
It's likely that in the not too distant future we will have AI that is in most every meaningful way smarter and faster than humans. When that happens most of the rest of human labor will be replaced as well. What will be left will be the things which automation cannot replace in a meaningful way, art, social type things, etc.
Both Brexit and Trump can be seen as the final stage of neoliberal economics: it ends in a populist revolt.
It's not as if labor is just now facing the threat of automation. But nobody in the US - not the unions, not the companies, not the government - is solving the education gap that might help future workers.
Bruce Perens.
Humans want to succeed and have a successful lineage, they want to build things, they want to tinker with things, they want to learn things, and they want to do so without oppression. This is an instinctual set of principles which led to Humans becoming the top of the Food chain. This is not limited to today, but a historical normal. No opportunity for self and family advancements leads to unrest and revolt. Just like all other Utopian dreams, the dream of the lazy human doing nothing while robots do all the work will not succeed.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
I'm not going to rehash the Nobel Prize winning economist I mentioned in my first post. Read them, study them, and learn from them. "Capitalism and Freedom" is a must read for anyone who wishes to discuss economic theory.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
The problem with "real" economic theories is that there are so many to choose from.
Here's a different economist who extends our current economic system to its logical conclusion, and also presents a viable alternative. It's very readable and a quick read - well worth a few moments if you want to see where we're headed.
It's clear to anyone who studies economics as a math problem that our current system is untenable going forward. In the limit of extremes, automation will supply all of humanity's production needs, while employing no one.
A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?
We're already feeling the pinch here in the US due to globalism. Real wages have been stagnant (against inflation), good jobs are increasingly hard to find, and people are forced to work multiple mc'jobs to make ends meet. Automated vehicles and drone delivery systems will put perhaps 10 million people out of work in the next 10 years.
America can stem the tide a little by stepping away from globalism, bit it's a temporary measure. Ultimately, AI will take over more jobs than it generates, people will tighten their belts and reduce spending, and this will continue until our current system collapses completely.
Something has to change, and we pretty-much know *what* has to change, but no one has any idea or plan on how to get there.
Traditional economics is religion, not science. It never predicts what will happen, only why something *did* happen. It makes conclusions by building a model to fit past data.
If you want to fix the economy, you have to look to the future.
Real economists don't do that.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
I disagree. Companies will do what they need to do to profit.
For example, software companies have moved to monthly fee models where you rent their software instead of buying it. The AI software of the future will likely move in this direction. I expect that the hardware will also evolve in the same way. For example, companies will either be allowed to rent the automation hardware or will be forced to buy "maintenance contracts" that generate the necessary level of income to support the companies that design and sell the hardware. As the software and the hardware will be quite complex, it will keep jobs active for lots of hardware and software engineers.
Automation is supposed to take away the boring and repetitive jobs. This is the goal. We don't have people digging holes with shovels at construction sites anymore... they are using excavators. The problem is that a lot of the replaced workers are not continuing their education to the point that they can get the design jobs. This needs to happen.
I know that in many cases this is a socioeconomic issue, but for others it is simply a personal choice. The US political parties need to stop lying to people and telling them that it is possible to bring these jobs back to the US. The only way this will be possible is if they tax the hell out of imports and no politician will be able to stomach that decision. In reality, the only solutions are to retrain the workers to do more complex tasks, to give them welfare forever, or to ship them off to China/India/Vietnam.
Currently, I'm the only person writing any code for my project.
20 years ago when I started my career, this project would take around 20-30 people to code. I'm not 20-30x better than they are. Instead, a whole lot of what I need is "automated". I don't have to write a network stack. I don't have to write a server or client. I don't have to serialize/deserialize the messages between the services. I don't have to write the deployment, monitoring and automatic recovery software. I don't have to write most of the testing code. And so on.
It's going to continue to get easier. So about the time I'm old enough to think about retirement, I'll probably be doing the work of 50-70 1990s-era programmers. If I'm still needed.
A near drag-and-drop "programming" interface for a typical business CRUD application would not be all that hard to do today, except for handling all the day-to-day edge cases. Add in a general-purpose AI, and suddenly you can handle those edge cases too.
And then the "programming" will be done by a relatively unskilled business analyst, except for the very, very, very few computer scientists working with AIs to produce the next version of the framework.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
The relevant question is whether that is its only meaning or likely to be the meaning inferred within the context it is used.
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/09/does-decimate-mean-destroy-one-tenth/
If you are going to be pedantic, at least be correct.
GP states that Milton Friedman believed in UBI, but that is not true. Friedman said that it may work as an alternative to Welfare under certain conditions. For example: Friedman believed in Welfare with an incentive to get off Welfare, which we have never had in the US. He also stated that Welfare was doomed to fail without tight immigration control, because it incentivized the least productive people immigrating and dis-incentivized productive people. Why come here to work if you pay 50% in Taxes, yet if you don't work you get Food, Housing, Transportation, and clothing from the State?
UBI is a Utopian fantasy, not a reality. Facts are dismissed when debating people propagating this fairy tale.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
It literally does but feel in to the same misuse as literally.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
New automation methods will drastically increase productivity, while growth is not expected to go through the roof top. In essence you need less jobs.
Please do not compare this with the industrial revolution, as we had a labor shortage than. Also automation applied in the 1980s with robots cost jobs, but growth was bigger (at least in Germany) so more new jobs were created outside the factories. Now the situation is different, as all jobs in offices are targeted and in addition, drivers, nurses etc.
I'm pretty sure Stephen Hawking knows what "decimate" means, and his use is absolutely correct.
Either definition is true. Automation has already reduced a large percentage of the jobs in manufacturing (def. 1) and has at least replaced one in ten workers in traditional manufacturing (def. 2).
That Stephen Hawking. He think's he's so smart, amirite?
You are welcome on my lawn.
It does. Hawking isn't using the term correctly. A bunch of window lickers will of course step forward to defend the improper usage because it's easier for them to try to change the language than it is to just admit they're wrong and stop doing it.
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
That is what it means in Latin. That is not what it means in English.
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
You neglect that a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming b) programming can be automated too and c) the US government woefully neglects any attempts at job retraining, unlike European countries, mostly because every effort we've done towards job retraining since Carter was president has been cheap bandaid attempts rather than bottom up serious efforts.
You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories we are now discussing being automated into non-existence. Also, simultaneously, millions of people employed in the trucking and taxi industry, including Uber, are facing the extinction of their jobs as automated cars take off. No, there will not be a rise in jobs servicing these cars either, as it's just as easy to develop an automated garage the cars just drive themselves into for service.
You can pretend all you like that new jobs will just pop out of the woodwork for these people but you're delusional. It's taken us 9 years to get back to the job growth we had before the last recession, our economy is not nearly robust enough to absorb the kind of jobless numbers we'll be seeing as automation really gets going.
Stay employed.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The middle class here in America time and time against votes against itself. Like pushing for manufacturing jobs that the Chinese (or realistically the Vietnamese and Cambodians) have instead of educating themselves for advanced manufacturing jobs... for an example of this done right, look at Germany.
In advanced, post industrial societies only free education at great schools (which America still has [college/university]) will keep your society moving forward and competitive. By not educating the masses or putting up huge barriers to education (costs), one shoots one's self in the foot.
In capitalist America everyone says how evil anything else is, yet when capitalism takes em to the slaughterhouse they cry like little piggies. Stop fucking whining about it and embrace the hell you've created idiots or actually fight for change.
I'm so tired of this shit. Stephen Fucking Hawking should stick to physics.
The only hope for Americas middle class with the emergence of automation and AI is that of a socialist society where the machines produce so much excess, giving people leisure time is essentially free. But again, people here hate anything not their snarling beast of an economic system (which actually isn't even fucking capitalism).
What you call the information sector was only enabled by technology simultaneously becoming available.
Languages change over time anyway. This is why we speak modern English, rather than Old English, Proto-Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European. And there is nothing you or any other pedant can do about it.
> a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming
And 200 years ago, not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to move to the city and just jump into manufacturing. 50 years ago not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to just jump into operating the new electronic machines.
> b) programming can be automated too
Farming was automated, manufacturing was automated. When manufacturing was automated, we got consistent, controllable quality. Maybe as programming is automated we'll gain the ability to have consistent, predictable quality in software. That would be awesome.
> You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories
That's quite the point. When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job. When the looms were automated (making textile products less expensive), people moved again to higher paying jobs. As the factories were automated, even less skilled people moved into office jobs - data entry, secretaries, customer service, etc. As secretarial, data entry, etc. was automated (making data-centered tasks less expensive), the entire information economy was created.
It goes back far beyond 250 years ago, too. The invention potter's wheel meant fewer people needed to be working on creating pottery, heck the wheel itself meant far fewer people were needed for MOST jobs. The result of that, always for thousands of years, is that the output of those tasks becomes less expensive, having been produced by machine. That allows people to do cool new stuff with it - the material is cheaply available and they have the time to do something new with it.
but there are two things I can't answer:
1. Who's gonna pay for it? Yeah, I could write a few paragraphs on this topic, but they're not gonna make folks feel good about paying taxes to fund things like single payer health care, basic income, free public university, etc, etc.
2. The Puritan work ethic. Folks get _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that somebody is doing OK and not working their ass off to do it. There's an intense amount of resentment for it. It's not fair they have to put 40 hours of misery in and somebody else stays home eating steak and lobster and bon-bons. Hell, 'not fair' is one of the first concepts children learn. It's deeply ingrained in us.
Unless somebody figures out what to do with those sentiments we're gonna just keep giving everything to the upper class because we can't bear the thought of it going to anybody else...
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Oh nose! Call Ned Ludd! Throw wooden shoes into the works!
And tractors and combine harvesters are going to throw the ploughmen and threshers out of work. Whatever will they do?
For a genius, he's not too bright, is he?
> What you call the information sector was only enabled by technology simultaneously becoming available.
Yes, the technology called "electricity" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Next, the technology called "electronics" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new , higher-paying jobs.
Yes, the technology called "computing" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Before any of that, the technology called the "steam engine" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
Before that, the technology called the "wheel" took over some old jobs and created a bunch of new, higher-paying jobs.
and wipe his butt?
(I work in eldrar care rather than the disabled, but the same skills are needd.
Productivity keeps going up, demand is going up less. Of course we're not going to be able to maintain full employment if there's just not enough work to be done with workers working 40 hours a week.
If people would work, say, 36 or even just 32 hours a week, we could maintain our standard of living, and at the same time get rid of this nightmare where some people are working themselves to death while others are desperate to find jobs.
Share the burdens more fairly, and share the rewards more fairly. It's totally possible, but of course you do have to let go of the business-knows-best, regulation-is-evil, government-is-always-the-problem-never-the-solution kind of orthodoxy.
Brake the machines on the way out and get a free DR in prison. Also room and board is free as well.
It will eradicate most jobs in time.
Reply unless the specifications are also automated the automatic programmers will write shit apps too. Maybe we should just kill off the humans and replace everything with machines.
yeah, we're boned
Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate"
It is you who ignores the obvious: languages change. See decimate "properly" vs "generally". What does the word really mean? Not so obvious. If you want to come across as anal then by all means uphold the "proper" (or ancient) meaning. But if you wish to be understood, consider accepting the generally understood meaning.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Decimate is an English word. Perhaps you meant "that is what it means in the context of ancient Roman military discipline."
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
in US any one can get a student loan to pay for being retrained and some schools say you have to start over as none of your credits will transfer.
I'm pretty sure I've heard this stuff before, concerns about capital becoming more important and ultimately marginalizing laborers. In fact, I think I heard about it in 1848, written by two Germans named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
ok, enough with this highly publicised idiot. He literally hasn't got a clue about the mystical / metaphysical aspects of the universe and the reasons it (and we) exists, yet he's all over the place yapping all kinds of nonsense about what the universe will bring to us. Every time I listen to him, I'm reminded of his narrow-minded (or rather, narrow-cultured) intelligence. He must be promoted by scientology or some other like-minded folks out there, for sure...
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Yes, but the farmers that got automated out mostly just went poor, they were not the ones that got the new whizzy jobs building washing machines, it being too far out of their comfort zone. People don't automatically find other ways to spend their time profitably when their job gets automated away.
Suppose long haul trucking gets automated away as seems likely to happen. There's very little chance those drivers are going become programmers. The truck stop waitresses won't either.
Another effect is that in the past when jobs got automated away, there were still many low skilled jobs for the majority of the people. That's not happening with the middle tier jobs that are going bye-bye. That and the scale of automation is much greater today than in the past.
Put quickly, just because that tree over your house hasn't yet punched a hole in your roof is no guarantee it won't tomorrow.
I don't profess to have any crystal ball into the future, or even deep understanding of the ever-evolving world of economics, but I do understand that people need jobs. Despite the increasing capabilities of today's machines, we're a long way of from sitting back and letting technology take care of our needs.
I believe in trying to help in little ways. For example, I don't use self-checkout machines at the supermarket, even if it means I have to stand in line. I don't want to help eliminate someone's job. I have similar feelings about self-serve gas pumps, bank machines, and cleaning up my own table when leaving a fast-food restaurant.
Are my efforts misguided and futile? Perhaps. Nevertheless, I believe that just because a thing CAN be done, that doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. I don't want to see wider replacement of human workers unless something else develops to mitigate further impoverishment of the working class.
10% doesn't seem too bad.
...our robot overlords but, in the last few decades, how many jobs were lost to them and how many were lost to lower-paid workers with no rights, healthcare, social safety net, etc. in developing countries? I wonder how Stephen Hawking would feel about being replaced by a small team of underpaid but very smart guys in India or China?
Why just middle class jobs?
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors. Why just wipe out manufacturing when you can also wipe out "higher" and "knowledge" jobs as well? If AI doctors are can out perform human doctors, why not AI lawyers? No human can memorize every single trial case, let alone know about it as it happens thus being able to argue precedence in real time. This seems simple to automation.
Doctors, Lawyers, drivers, manufacturing.... what's left?
Isn't it strange that the very thing invented to enhance human productivity, AI, is going to make a large section of people non-productive. The problem is not AI but that the fruits of productivity is limited to a small section of people. The world will need to evolve to accept concepts like Universal Basic Income to share the fruits of AI with all.
> Another effect is that in the past when jobs got automated away, there were still many low skilled jobs for the majority of the people.
It's not that there were *still* jobs. When electricity became readily available, machines started doing many jobs that previously had been done by humans, and that same automation that took over some jobs created many, many more jobs. There were a LOT of low to medium-skill jobs created by popularity lf electrical machines. I'd bet the MAJORITY of people currently working for less than $20/hour are doing jobs where they use electrical machines - automation created their job.
Later, electronics automated many jobs, and created many more. Then computers automated many jobs , most secretarial work, bookkeeping, etc. At the same time, the availability of computers created many new jobs. It's not that there were still jobs "left over", most of us do jobs that didn't exist 200 years ago; our jobs were CREATED by automation. What do you do in your job? I bet your job is to supervise and control some machine that automatically does the hard part for you.
> That and the scale of automation is much greater today than in the past.
It was in the late 1800s to mid 1900s that most jobs were automated in the sense that a machine does the actual "hands on" work while the human supervises and controls it. In the farmer's field, the combine lifts the harvest from the soil, while the farmer sits at the controls. The pilot sits and waits in case the autopilot needs to be switched to a new route. Workers at the dam and power plant watch screens, ready to push the button which causes the system to open and close gates thousands of feet away, if the system determines that it's safe to do so based on all sensor inputs. Very few workers use their muscles today. Rather, they monitor, control, and R&D tyre machines that do the real work. The pace of that transition peaked around 1941.
The most recent peak was 75 years ago, but this has been happening since the invention of the wheel. The3 availability of wheels meant that machines could be built to do things. That eliminated many jobs and created many more.
And 200 years ago, not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to move to the city and just jump into manufacturing. 50 years ago not everyone had the ability, skill, or desire to just jump into operating the new electronic machines.
Skill? Most manufacturing jobs were deliberately reduced to easily repeatable steps that an average below high school educated person could accomplish. Just the sort of jobs to fit hordes of ill educated farmhands. Hardly the same as expecting someone to jump from a repetitive GED level job into college level computer engineering skill.
That's quite the point. When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job. When the looms were automated (making textile products less expensive), people moved again to higher paying jobs. As the factories were automated, even less skilled people moved into office jobs - data entry, secretaries, customer service, etc. As secretarial, data entry, etc. was automated (making data-centered tasks less expensive), the entire information economy was created.
"Some" people moved up. The majority have shifted into whatever part-time McJob they can find to try to make ends meet.
So if the future holds less jobs, why do we want more people?
What if the factories were not allowed to own the robots which worked there, but only citizens, who reaped an appropriate wage from their work, just like a contractor who hires out a piece of machinery.
than modern American workers. There was 80 years of abject poverty and unemployment after the industrial revolution but we sorta skip over that (along with anything in opposition to a pro-capitalism narrative) in school. In the 60s women moved into the workforce not for freedom but to make ends meet as wages started dropping after the post WWII and post Union gains. Again, we ignore all that.
Nobody's saying we should go back to tilling the field. We're saying we should learn history and learn from it.
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there was 80+ years of massive unemployment after the industrial revolution. "Luddite" once had a meaning beyond someone afraid of technology. It was a political movement in response to job losses that our social systems didn't make up. Our society never did make those losses up either. We killed several million working age men in two World Wars, saw some technical advancements employ people in new fields and shipped our sweat shops overseas. What we did _not_ do is fix our social structures. Instead there was 200 years of general misery for no good reason.
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How about all those creative fields? You know? The ones everyone's pirating?
... among other things: "Fatal Flaws in the Theory of Comparative Advantage" http://americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3076
Oh it's solved...if you don't mind being in debt for the rest of your life.
Here's the thing: anybody who was in a physical condition that was good enough to work in agriculture, could switch to working at a factory, even weaker people could do it. As factories/mines got more efficient, the same people still worked there but were able to produce more for the factory owner.
However, not everybody working in a factory can switch to R&D, inventions, web page design, programming, engineering etc. You need to be more educated for any of these jobs than you do to work with a power loom. The problem is that not everybody can be educated (let's face it, some people are better with, say, math than others) and even if they were able to learn as well as anyone else, education is expensive in some countries, but they cannot pay for it because they don't have money because they don't have a job anymore and when they had a job, the pay was barely enough to survive.
Unlike the prior eras, there are not enough new jobs to replace the old jobs in the time needed to train or retrain.
Economics cannot explain away this one.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hawking is wrong about which class of jobs are threatened, and wrong about the consequences. Lower class jobs are set to be wiped out AND the results of that will be far worse than Hawking estimates, but he is right to be concerned about overpopulation and so forth.
Take an average youth looking for their starter job. Today, they might flip burgers or work a cash register or some other similar entry level job. But in the near future, a lot of fast food jobs are going to be automated. And self-checkout continues to spread.
What will the average youth do for work? There won't be a lot of options. And kids who have no jobs and no hope of getting one often fall into crime and other habits that impact society. We could easily have mobs of kids roaming cities because they have nothing else to do, and if they end up irate or angry, it could result in riots, looting, fires, etc.
It gets worse.
As we automate cars and trucks, we won't need a whole slew of other jobs. Automated cars won't crash as much so we won't need body shops and mechanics, insurance agents and related workers (this goes right into white collar workers too). Police won't write as many tickets which will directly impact many towns that depend on that revenue. Likewise lawyers and courts will suffer reduced case load from car accidents and personal injuries that don't happen, so clinics and doctors geared toward that kind of care will have fewer patients paying them.
Meanwhile, automated cars will make it far less likely for people to make impulse stops such as for fast food or snacks at gas stations. And automated cars might go refuel themselves in the middle of night to take advantage of down time or empty roads. Or they might be plug-in. In all these cases, there will be far less need for people to work at places where drivers make those stops. You won't need gas station clerks. And yes automated refueling is possible. There have been prototype robot gas stations in the works for 20 years. Only the fact that labor was cheap has kept it from becoming an option.
The net result of all these changes are a LOT of lower class people who will have no job options. And nobody is slowing down having babies. Populations are soaring. There won't be jobs for all.
Does society owe anyone a job? Probably not. But we have to realize society will demand something be done about mass unemployment and youths running rampant in the cities and towns. We'll want it fixed. Jobs are one way to try to do that. Of course there needs to be some kind of job to do. I don't see anything on the horizon that promises to employ the number of people we have now much less in 20 years.
Hawking is absolutely right that this is the biggest threat humanity has faced. It is itself a huge, dangerous issue. And one way societies have solved over population and unemployment problems is by having wars. Which is not going to be fun for anyone.
Sig for hire.
What the studies show, overwhelmingly, is that as a culture moves from being based in manufacturing to electronics and then information technology, the new programmers and database administrators hire daycare teachers, home care aids for their parents, hair dressers, and many other low-skilled jobs that arw better than the unskilled jobs picking cotton. Specifically, for every job lost, about five are created, and they aren't all high-tech, needing a lot of education. Factory workers change their own oil, database administrators HIRE someone to change their oil.
Remember the "paperless" office, how computers were supposed to eliminate paper? Yeah right! Sure, there are some paperless offices, but that is not the norm. Most offices go through more paper now than they ever did. That paperless office was supposed to be a reality back in the 90's. So much for that!
The role of paper has changed. It used to be the primary, permanent storage medium for information. Now it's more of a temporary medium to store text while it's in process. After the process is complete, the paper is often destroyed. Still, paper hasn't gone away.
Similarly, it's going to take much longer than anyone anticipates, to replace office workers with automation. And similarly, the role of office workers will change, and might even grow.
It's a lost cause for America, anyway.
Only for leftists bent on screeching "Hate! Bigotry! Shut up!". For the rest of us, it represents a second Reagan-like morning in America.
bigotry and misandry and globalism.
All things that the left teaches, and to do so violently towards non-leftists.
Besides, nationalism isn't a bad thing after all.
Rome burned and people still live there.
Unchecked moral decay caused Rome to burn.
Evangelical Christians get their way
The country is more than just Liberty University. On the other hand, it'd be nice to see university rioters get the Gov. Reagan treatment again.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Obama got more people to work than anyone else ever.
Foreigners and diversity candidates. The rest fell out and are on assistance programs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Specifically the part about the Butlerian Jihad, where Ludd's beliefs win on a massive scale.
Then question why you even supported automation as a replacement, not as a companion.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
No, the technology called "AI" took over about every old job and destroyed more jobs than it created.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors.
Non-Watson-based citation needed.
I wonder what the (snark-free) medical symbol would be for communicating "AI Not Authorized for Medical Treatment/Human Treatment Only". I'd be more than happy to have one on me until AI is a strict companion, not a replacement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'd like to know why the goverments aren't investing in this high end automation.
What do the welfare people need? Shelter, food, maybe booze, TV/Internet.
Why doesn't the government build the robots to provide those things? With the output going to the people already demanding help?
Rather than demand the productive population work to care for the unproductive (whatever the reason) population, let the darn robots that want to take everyone's jobs do it.
Need to move them around? Free autodrive goverment uber access. Growing crops? There are already prototypes of fully automated mini farms. Build some robots to build those. This can't be an unsurmountable problem.
Heck, tell companies that if they want to replace jobs by automation, the will need to supply a fraction of their automation to the goverment to be used for this purpose.
Stephen Hawking isn't an "expert" on anything other than some obscure areas of physics. He certainly isn't an expert on automation, AI, jobs, or economics. Hawking never even held a regular middle-class job in his life. Hawking's opinions on social and economic matters are about as relevant as Shockley's.
For one thing, we have too many people who just aren't smart enough for college. I suppose we could do something about that with better child rearing, but that would cost a ton of money and require people to spend a fortune on other people's kids. In my neck of the woods we can't even get a .05% (not cent, percent) sales tax though to fund our schools. There where 45 kids in my kid's high school English. She used to come home tired from standing because there were no seats. She went to one of the best public schools in the city.
And all of this is before we talk about clean air, clean drinking water (Flint, MI is going to have a generation of problems from Lead poisoning, and Donald Trump will be cutting back on the regulations to catch and prevent that sort of thing..). Again, who's gonna pay for it?
And let's imagine for an instant we do get folks to pay for it, what then? What are we going to do with a planet of 6 billion highly educated people? We're gonna get 5 billion people with advanced training, not 5 billion Eisensteins. Are we really going to have jobs for them all? China doesn't, and they're desperately clamping down on their over-educated populace to keep them from revolting...
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so you can sit around and not work? What gives you the right to take my money to support somebody else? Maybe I don't want to give up my hard earned cash?
/. give me one either, and I've been asking on every one of these threads...
Unless you can answer those questions you're not going to get anywhere with post scarcity socialism. I've got answers, but none of them feel good. They're all very reasonable and logical answers and they all make people feel bad. Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and the American left have been trying to figure out what to do about that sentimentality for years and haven't come up with an answer. I haven't heard anyone on
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Seriously, this is not news or surprising. It also does not need true/strong AI (which is not even on the distant horizon, despite what non-experts like you claim). Simple automation with some dumb learning capabilities is quite enough. The problem is that many middle-class jobs do not require much sophistication.
Maybe you should stick to physics, where you have proven to be a brilliant mind, instead of saying redundant and frequently wrong things about a field you are not an expert in?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
via birth control if we let it. Look at Japan and the Netherlands. If anything under population will be a problem (not enough youngins to take care of the old farts).
That''s all solvable too, but I'm not sure we can keep a lid on the Christians and their Anti-Birth Control crusades. We just put a certifiable nutter into the VP slot. Basically, what happens next is entirely dependent on whether we can keep our religious minority from throwing human civilization under a bus like they did for a thousand years during the Dark Ages.
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The American infrastructure is crumbling, so give infrastructure repair work to the unemployed population. That will require decades of jobs to fix.
Well, it depends on what you think the average human is capable of.
The way our society works is that you exchange your work for money in order to survive. Your whole survival depends on how much your work is valued on the labor market. If the only thing you are able to exchange is physical labor, congratulations, it's already worth almost nothing and you might starve in a near future! If the only thing you can exchange is prone to automation (hint: at the moment everything that is on the labor market is prone to automation), you will not make a dime.
So actually, what you are proposing is that people should evolve skills which value is not going to sink due to automation. Which begs two fundamental questions:
1. What are those skills? You speak of information, but automated information generation is already successful. Automated creation is on the rise, and partly already successful. Or you mean we will discover that soon enough, and the people in college right now are certainly not being taught those next things.
2. Do you really think everybody can catch up? There's the trend: the jobs that remain are the highest skilled one, which by definition are reserved to the lucky few that are able to do them. I don't think 90% of the population can defend a PhD, whatever the domain they prefer. Maybe you think that 90% of the population can improve their skills so as to beat the machine, forever.
So it all boils down to this: your faith in what the average human is capable of that is not automatable and has value on the market. Long term trend, I think is nil. Short term trend, I think it's below 30% of the population.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
When people no longer had to pick the cotton (making raw cotton less expensive), they could instead work making things with the cotton, a higher paying job.
Yep. It's pretty easy to imagine higher-paying jobs for slaves and/or sharecroppers.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
As the average slashdoter , you are probably not the lowest paid of society, and have probably some gadget or leisure activity you can spend free time on. Now try to see what would happen with your life with no income, no monetary costly leisure. Good luck with that one, you would wish you could be tilling a field if only to be doing something
The problem is not that stuff get automated today, the problem is that contrary to the industrial revolution, the automated job are gone forever : nothing is coming to allow a new field and replace jobs.
Something in the use of "riot robot" suggest me it is a plain lack of empathy, and most probably a utter failure to see that it could happen to him too.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Decimate meant comrade legionnaires killing 1 in 10 of their battalion by beating them to death. I think it well describes humans trying to make other humans unemployed.
So it makes you question why were constantly bombarded by the imminent collapse of the most basic jobs. What is really happening is an attack on those with the least pay and working rights in a highly articulate manner but a very narrow view of what is really happening.
In context for this justification:
The management jobs we are so familiar with in corporations do not make them more efficient. This was done deliberately throughout industrialization over the last 200 years because having a position of 'McManager' causes competition amongst workers to attain the manager title. By aggregate this suppresses demands for wage rises and represents a saving in wages that can go to profit for the company. This is why workers co-ops are surprisingly so productive versus highly vertical command chains of corporations. (could it be that so many layers of managers are increasingly diminished returns).
In the next 25 years basic jobs will be partially or fully automated but that will open up new jobs.
Your government aggregate levels of fiscal spending is the creation of high powered money into the economy, rate of taxation is deletion of currency and spending power by the private sector out of the economy.
Spending equals income: that is to say think of the consumers balance sheet they must have assets/disposable income and a propensity to spend it (not paying down debt) in the first place to buy the stuff (produced by some level of AI or not) so this is a domain constraint on any private enterprise wanting to displace large tracts of workforce by automating them. They will do it then find their market for selling this stuff is not profitable because the economy is in balance sheet recession.
This also assumes that capitalism is still inspired by industrialization motives. Which it is not. Its now is a fiancialised ponzi-scheme state where finance, real estate and insurance produce nothing instead have a parasitic effect on growth and production.
Surprisingly well predicated by Marx:
"Talk about centralisation! The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks
and the big-money lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and
gives this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial
capatilists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner - and this gang
knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it..."
---published by engels
For the transition of the next pool of jobs into automation via some level of AI for the worst outcome you have to have the following factors:
*massive inequality through and oversized financial system. People living day to day just paying down debts
*government ideologically constrained to spend from the infinite set of dollars, yen, pounds it issues to do anything about it (Eg: wether this is UBI, a job guarantee more welfare etc).
*government likewise being completely unconstrained with corporate welfare. Eg: 2008 GFC and foreclosures buying up bad assets at keystroke/ too big to fail after epic corporate fraud.
*constraint of physical resources eg: climate change, running out of physical assets/destruction via warfare.
*ignore massive opportunities for human workers (eg: planning, building, protecting the environment in anticipation of further effects of climate change).
*leaving outcomes up to the 'free market' disgraced way of operating. (optimises a system towards short term profitability)
...is that the US is about to enjoy the greatest job producing president the world has ever known.
So nobody has to worry.
Unfortunately, there is no solution to this problem.
Regional instability will mean more migrants and immigrants to other places, which means more regional population growth which means more unemployment. Regardless of the factor of AI or tech. (AI and automation will greatly exacerbate the problem but it is not the root cause.)
The only solution is to have fewer people. However that is not going to happen globally. It is already too late. Developing countries populations are booming, life expectancy is jumping, and this isn't going to change in the next 20 years. Developing countries rightfully want what the first world has.
The only real guarantee you can have is to buy enough land where you can farm and hopefully not starve to death. However, for land to be productive you need a water source. Land with water commands a premium. Underground aquifers are already starting to dry up and the local climate cycles are quickly changing. (Predictable rain falls are becoming less predictable.)
You also need money to buy the land and as has been noted solid 'middle class' jobs are already drying up. Also, farm work in general is.... extremely laborious. There is always work to be done. Many family own farms have taken generations of people to develop the land.
We might be alive today, but we are already dead as a species.
The same thing will happen that have happened every time technology progressed and replaced human work: new job types will be created and people will shift to them. Sure, some in the generation current to the introduction of robot overlords will become poor, but next generations won't.
> I personally consider hiring someone to do some job usually as somewhat of a failure of myself - either I am incompetent to do it myself or too lazy. ...
> I work as a sysadmin as my day job btw.
That was me up until about five years ago. Then about five years ago I started spending my time studying and getting some new certifications, which will also apply toward a degree. I now make four times as much money as I did five years ago, and I spend 25% of that directly paying people to do things I used to do myself. (For example renovating a bathroom last month.)
That leaves me with three times as much money (which I spend in ways that indirectly fund jobs for others), while the people I hire directly get paid as much as I used to make.
Economically, we're all better off if I specialize in what I'm best at, spending time increasing those skills, while paying other people to do what they're good at. I suppose that's the difference between a tribal economy where everybody hunts their own food and builds their own home versus a modern economy where professional construction workers build homes and professional farmers raise food for everyone. I suppose I'm ABLE to grow all my own vegetables, but that's wasteful of my time when I could instead be doing what I specialize in.
In the past we saw automation as mechanisation, which largely replaced the need for manual labour in the fields and in factories.
People escaped into services or getting a degree.
What we are seeing now with more to come is automation as artificial intelligence, which promises to largely replace the need for human insight.
Try educating your way out of that one.
This happened before with the fall of Rome. Citizen jobs were automated by slave labor until society collapsed. Dystopia future!
What, no-one's posted a link to the over-simplistic and shallow short story Manna and been vapidly modded to +5 Insightful?
What is Slashdot coming to...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
over to the factories.
:(.
1. What do you do in the meantime while the job losses are going on?
2. Once all that wealth and power has concentrated into the hands of the factory owners how do we get them to give it up? They're going to have automatic guns attached to their drones and no compunction about using them. In the past revolutions happened because even the military elite turned against the ruling class. That won't happen when the military elite is 5 guys watching over the drones and another 20 keeping them running...
Basically we need to do something now before it all goes to shit and we enter a 1000 year dark age, but I can't figure out how to get people to be willing to solve problems before they happen
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Technology and science not greed nor capitalism is causing the poor to have access to many things previous generations have.
The government will have to absorb those people whose jobs will be replaced by automation. The government does not have the same 'productivity' requirements as the private sector. The choice will be between some form of welfare or public sector jobs that may in fact be welfare. Realistically, the government is already doing this. The military industrial complex is a form of welfare. Besides the people in the military we provide meaningful labor to a large swath of people across all states. If we were ever to pause and spend less, there will be a huge depression the likes of which we have never seen. Obamacare is another example. The government props up failed or unnecessary industries all the time. Imagine if the US went to a single payer system. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of health insurance related jobs will vanish. I am quite certain that is one of the reasons why things are not changing in health care. The powers that be see what the impact of such a policy would have at the scale of a country like the US.
many people who say it will all work out also neglect the past & the pace. When the pace of job loss is great, problems will occur. There are several examples (generally on a community scale) where the sudden loss of jobs is locally catastrophic for a generation or more. When we can suddenly begin displacing millions of driving jobs a year, there will be immense short term pain or extremely expensive bandaids. This happens even if "it all works out" for more/better jobs in the future. It will be amusing when a mob of 10,000 out of work taxi drivers converge on the palo alto communities who shrug off these "small time details,"
When the elephant craps on a haystack, finding the needle is even less fun. When the elephant deliberately binges on legumes and kelp and sun-ripened fish sauce for the sole purpose of defiling the haystack, this thread—so far as I managed to get— is the end result.
So thanks to the first ten posts I skimmed for tilting the payoff matrix so far towards rational ignorance and learned helplessness that even my three adult decades of burly and well-callused sanity is squeaking like a little girl, blubbering like a baby, and asking for a day pass.
It's official. I call "uncle".
You know truck drivers? Yeah, probably the last middle class job that pays well without requiring a college degree is going away really soon.
2.8 million people drive trunks in America. What's next for them once Otto passes trials and can legally operate?
...grant for 1.5 times the unit requirements for an associates degree at a community college and a basic income at 200% the federal poverty level, adjusted for cost of living at the recipient's chosen school, renewable at least once every five years ( the newly-trained career field my also become obsolete). FTFY
In fact, how about turning the "professional (grad) student" onto a recognized, paid occupation?!
Have gnu, will travel.
If you want your BUI check, then do 3 hours of volunteer work, take 3 hours of education, or teach 3 hours of education. BUI will fail otherwise and only create inflation.
To proclaim to be imminent that which has been going on for decades is not exactly what you would call an impressive feat of prognostication.
Seriously, the middle class has been dying for decades and he’s only just catching on to the trend now? Kinda proves the point that academic brilliance isn’t all that useful in dealing with real-world problems.
>> 1. What are those skills?
How about prostitution?
The point is the n members of the group are on a ladder; ranked based on net-worth/money/power. A human with more power will buy the service of one who is lower in the ladder. This keeps going for a lower position person to someone still lower down. Even when someone has nothing to offer, the person higher in the ladder will provide under names like charity, feel-good, etc. So total collapse of society cannot happen -- the only way that can happen is when you block science and technology and spread superstitions (like the dark-ages in Europe) [leading to a shortage of essentials like food/water/medicine]
Trump will kill those middle-class jobs long before automation and AI.
Hawking's scenario would only come true if it's decided we shouldn't grow the economy. In other words, in a stagnant, zero-growth economy, he's probably right. However, humanity can -- and must -- substantially upgrade the global economy where all people will have sophisticated jobs and will be needed despite AI and automation.
b) programming can be automated too
No, it can't. Programmers self-automate all the time, it's called abstraction.
Done right, it makes them more productive. Done wrong, well... it "creates jobs".
The only thing that will automate away programmers will be Strong AI - strong with a capital 'S'.
Do away with stockholder parasitism. Finance companies with bonds.
Correct!
The BBC did a small radio article on it a while back, on how the specific -10% thing hadn't really been in regular use for ages, and the "fragged" meaning had been in common use for multiple centuries.
Except that, as many others have already commented, this is exactly what *didn't* happen. Or at least, there wasn't a 1:1 transference of labour from farming to manufacturing.
When manufacturing was offshored, what happened to all the factory workers? Some may have been able to move upward. The vast majority did not. Now these same people are basically working at less than minimum wage as walmart greeters.
And even then, they still had it better than we will now. Education costs have absolutely skyrocketed. If a person in their mid-life wants to go to university, they will most likely be dead before they've been able to pay off their school debt. And this is assuming they can even find a job because the job pool isn't growing at nearly the pace that the world population is.
The single biggest difference here is that we are in a position where *all* jobs are will be automated away. From Drivers to Doctors, *everything* is under threat. What do you hope to do when, even if it were possible to re-train to a more advanced field, *that* field has been automated away as well?
> If a person in their mid-life wants to go to university, they will most likely be dead before they've been able to pay off their school debt.
I started school at age 38. My total cost of attendance at a state university is $14,000; $6,000 / year tuition minus $2,500 / year tax credit. If the IT degree increases my income by even $4,500 / year, I'll pay for itself in about three years.
In fact, three years into school, the classes I've already completed are one reason my income increased $45,000/year while I'm still in school. The schooling pays for itself before I even graduate. You may have seen the story on Slashdot today that the average annualized income of an intern in a tech company is $70,000. That's the average for people who are still students who choose their major wisely. So the cost of school is 2 1/2 month's salary, going into the fields that are now in demand. Of course, if you major in women's studies and marijuana at Columbia, your salary may be lower and your costs higher. Decisions do have consequences.
> The vast majority did not. Now these same people are basically working at less than minimum wage as walmart greeters.
The vast majority are working at less than minimum wage? Citation very much needed. You might find one where you pulled that data from, your ass. Or did you get that from a Bernie speech and forget to spend two seconds thinking about whether it makes any sense whatsoever?
I did see the article about interns supposedly making $70k. I call bullshit on that one. Maybe that's what happens if you're particularly lucky and manage to get a job at google or some VC backed startup with more money than sense, but there's no way in hell a lowly intern is going to make that kind of money with no experience at a normal company. I've been working in IT my whole life and I have *never* seen such a ridiculously generous salary for someone in an intern role.
Regarding university, are you saying you did a full course load AND high paying job? I'm absolutely calling bullshit on that, unless you sacrificed all your free time, abandoned any hope of ever having a full night sleep at that time, nor having a social life.
I'm sorry but your story sounds so idyllically successful that I simply cannot believe you. This is not the kind of thing that happens to an average person unless they happen to have some excellent connections and/or are a professional bullshit artist who exudes enough charisma to con their way into positions much loftier than their skill set deserves.
So it seems whenever someone chooses to do something with their life, rather than playing victim, you "call bullshit" and pretend it never happened. If that's the way you choose to live, that's your choice.
> Regarding university, are you saying you did a full course load AND high paying job? I'm absolutely calling bullshit on that,
Most of my study is listening to video courses during my commute (and any other time I'm in the car). It turns out I'm in the car 10 hours per week or so. Udemy puts out a lot of videos, CBT Nuggets, and O'Reilly had a 60% off sale last week. I have text books on my phone which I read whenever I'm waiting for 5-10 minutes. You may be someone who checks Slashdot or Facebook 3,4, or 10 times per day; I spend those short times reading a few pages in a text book.
Once I *understand* a topic by having it explained audibly and reading it, then on my lunch hour I practice, or write, or whatever I need to do to reinforce it that I can't do in 10-minute chunks.
Quoting myself:
> You may be someone who checks Slashdot or Facebook 3,4, or 10 times per day
I just clicked your user name and I see that yesterday (a work day for most people), you posted on Slashdot seven times. Assuming that you read *before* you reply, that's maybe an hour and a half to read the story and the other comments, then make your reply.
Depending on how fast you read, an hour and a half is 30-150 pages. Let's guess on the lower end, 45 pages for you in an hour and a half. 45 pages X 7 days in a week - you could read 315 textbook pages per week in the time you spend reading Slashdot comments and posting here, if you wanted to. If you spend the same amount of time on some other site, such as Facebook, that's 730 pages per week.
Just your Slashdot time is, for a slower reader, enough time to read 16,000 pages per year. That's almost twice as much as you need to read in a year of college.