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Many CEOs Believe Technology Will Make People Largely Irrelevant (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on BetaNews:Although artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other emerging technologies may reshape the world as we know it, a new global study has revealed that the many CEOs now value technology over people when it comes to the future of their businesses. The study was conducted by the Los Angeles-based management consultant firm Korn Ferry that interviewed 800 business leaders across a variety of multi-million and multi-billion dollar global organizations. The firm says that 44 percent of the CEOs surveyed agreed that robotics, automation and AI would reshape the future of many work places by making people "largely irrelevant." The global managing director of solutions at Korn Ferry Jean-Marc Laouchez explains why many CEOs have adopted this controversial mindset, saying: "Leaders may be facing what experts call a tangibility bias. Facing uncertainty, they are putting priority in their thinking, planning and execution on the tangible -- what they can see, touch and measure, such as technology instruments."
I'll ask this question, which has come up before: If nobody has a job, then where the [bad language redacted] will they find CUSTOMERS?
It's well known by just about anyone who looks that our current economic system is not tenable going forward. In the extreme limit, we can imagine all human needs produced by automated systems, with no human interaction required.
We're closer to this than you might think. Automated farming is almost available now, automated delivery (self-driving trucks) is almost here, and automated last-mile delivery by drone is almost here. A largely automated solar cell factory could produce more solar cells than it needs to supply its own production - build one of these in Arizona or Nevada or western Utah and let it make and install its own cells and geometrically increase its power generation capacity.
(If you've ever driven Rte 55 across Nevada and Western Utah, you know that there are large swaths of flat, generally sunny desert land that aren't used for anything. All current US electrical needs could be supplied by solar cells filling a square 20 miles on a side. More-or-less, depending on assumptions.)
I don't mean to say that these would be *completely* automated, but if the entire production of the US population can be maintained by 100,000 workers, it's effectively full automation.
The best guess for future economics is that everyone will be given an allowance (a virtual $1000 each month, say) to spend on production, and order the goods and services they need online. During the month the factories will produce the goods, to be delivered automatically by drone.
Also, local automated stores in the manner of Wal-Mart will be built for everyday needs. Walk in and grab a new winter coat whenever you need one.
The geometric progression of the solar-cell factory also translates to other production. With proper management, that $1000 allowance would grow over time as more production comes online, making it possible to purchase more and more goods with the monthly allowance.
This is pretty-much where we need to go in order to maintain our civilization on the planet.
The Universal Basic Income comes up and is discussed periodically, but it's always panned as being too expensive or unworkable. No one anywhere is willing to give up the results of their labour for free, no one is willing to pay workers a decent wage if they can get away with less, and no one is willing to reduce wage hours (holding salary constant) to make enough jobs for people.
It really looks like our economic system will have to crash and burn before we can transition to the new system.
We know what the economic system must be going forward, but no one seems to know how to get there.
You need to come up with an alternative to welfare. A good many people will not be happy (or good neighbors) with nothing to do. A sense of purpose is important.
It's time to start thinking about how a society which want a social safety net can incentivize people people to not have children they can't afford.
How do we NOT support breeding?
This is as important - if not more important - than universal basic income.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Pay people to serve in a real life version of Starfleet?
Go away for a some number of years and when you come back, you're guaranteed whatever luxury income for life. Space is risky now and will be for quite some time so maybe have it like 5 years for full retirement.
Maybe the ability to have children will be shut off by default from birth by some genetic engineering thing and switched on via some other means after passing a kind of character credit check that's easier to pass if you served in this hypothectical "Starfleet" due to the nature of it.
Today, not everybody gets to be an Astronaut. Tomorrow, not everybody gets to be a parent.
Eventually, maybe Earth will only be home to those who don't have "the right stuff" for space travel and they can live as they please.
The Homo genus eventually gains a new species. Homo Stellaris?
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
It's not welfare, per se; it's paying people to pursue their own goals. It provides a safe income for artists, musicians, and entertainers to be able to create new media without going through the creativity killing workforce. When people are free of a financial burden they will be free to innovate and pursue their dreams. The reason why modern Americans don't use their free time to do this already is because the American capitalist economy is a burden, not a release. People don't have time or energy to innovate because they're a cog in the wheel. If we release them from the machine, they'll be working for their own joy and not for the bottom line of some giant corporation.
I'd like to be a fly on the wall when they roll in the first robot CEO.
"But, but, but, but I'm irreplaceable!"
I see nobody's linked it yet, so this seems like a good place to put the oblig thingie.
What about cutting down full time to 32 hours a week at the start. And say down the road we get to the idea of people doing about 20-25 a week as the full time.
I'm sure some proponents of basic income want it to be enough to put someone above the poverty line, but there's no reason it couldn't be the minimum amount of money for a person to survive at the lowest possible standard of living, single room in a shared house or studio apartment, beans and rice, enough gas/electrical to keep the temp between 50-95. That's still a lot of incentive to go out and find a job. I don't know if basic income is a great system or not, but it seems more logical than the top-heavy & patriarchal welfare system we have now, and if it's available to everyone it cuts back on the resentment in some ways. Milton Friedman advocated for it.
Your argument says more about you than the basic income.
Are you saying that if you were given a basic income you would just sit on your ass all day watching TV? That you have no marketable skills whatsoever? That even if you did something for free the consensus would be that we're better off if you stop?
Or do you imagine that everyone else is like that but you're a uniquely talented special snowflake in a field of dirt clods?
It's amazing that I will have to devolve here to explaining something so blatantly obvious once more, but here it goes...
Money is expression of work, it's not paper, it's the productive output of the system. Money is a store of value, it is a unit of account and means of exchange.
Money allows people to trade more efficiently, it's one of the greatest inventions of human civilization: allowing deferral of consumption to a future time, this in turn allows the stored value to be used for more productive purposes than simply consumption.
What I am talking about is investment capital, a bundle of money that was saved and not consumed and can be used to build another profitable enterprise (profitable is done well and somewhat lucky, otherwise the enterprise may be a money losing venture).
But the most important thing to understand that people are not trading for money, people are trading for consumption. People are trading with each other with goods expressed in money. Money allows us to barter with each other within the entire society without having to haul all of our wares around with us to do the barter. Money makes is convenient but also possible to trade half an egg for quarter litre of gasoline (roughly). You couldn't easily trade half an egg with barter, but with money you can.
But realise that we are trading *goods and services* with each other, we are not trading for pieces of paper. We are trading for the promise of being able to buy goods and services with that paper.
If you take all of this into account you should understand that trading has to be 2 sided, it takes 2 to trade, you cannot have one part to the trade that produces something and another part that only consumes, that's not a trade, that's worthless for the producing side of the trade.
So you cannot tax the producers to give the non-producers ability to take from producers.
Example: 3 people. Person A produces bread, person B produces meat, person C produces nothing.
Trade between person A and person B is meaningful. However if it is taxed and the tax is part of what person A makes and part of what person B makes and then this is given to person C then there is no net advantage to person A or person B in this at all.
So person C can have bread and meat but he didn't make anything to give back to persons A and B. He can still trade with them of-course.
So person C can trade person B some bread that he got from person A.
C can trade some meat he got from B with person A.
But neither A nor B are better off in this exchange, this exchange subtracts from what they do, because person C also consumes some of the bread and meat, he has less that is left over to keep trading with A and B.
The point is that A and B are actually trading while C is not, he is adding to the amount of work that A and B are doing but he is not adding anything useful or net positive into this equation.
This is a simplified version but the logic is the same. People on welfare are or no use to the people who are productive and are capable of trading with other productive people.
You can't handle the truth.