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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.
A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?
Pure communism has no need for money. Marx said the capitalist will make the rope that is used to hang him, and I believe that more each day.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions
It also didn't take a genius to understand these exact same predictions when they were made in the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. It also doesn't take an expert to see, with the benefit of hindsight, that all of those predictions were wrong. What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
If you think that productivity improvements cause poverty, you are not an "expert".
In those other time periods you mentioned, there was some civility between persons. Even enemies were treated respectfully. The difference now is that no-one cares about anyone else. It is all ME! ME! ME! Greed is good, remember. So what if 1000 people get laid off? I get a bigger yacht/mansion/island.
Some other nice ones:
Markets are efficient iff P=NP
Finding out if there are booby traps in certain derivatives (like CDOs) is NP-complete