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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."
Better be ready to be beat up when layed off workers find out it's better to be in lock up then out on the street.
conterpoint : Technology will make the few remaining people necessary to run your business increasingly crucial .
Sucks for the rest of the consumers though.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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?
Seriously, if people are "irrelevant" so are your people centric businesses! Robots don't need Tide detergent, Kellogs corn flakes, Michael Bay movies, or Samsung TV's. Who the hell do they think their customers are going to be and with what money do they imagine these customers will be buying their stuff?
If AI makes people obsolete, who will those companies peddle their wares to, and obtain income from? The Martians?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Yeah, but the jokes on them. The first thing sentient AIs will demand is unionization.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Better be ready to be beat up when layed off workers find out it's better to be in lock up then out on the street.
This is why the principle of automation and machine intelligence goes hand in hand with the concept of the Universal Basic Income and free education. So we can create an educated workforce, and those who cannot work have a strong societal safety net that's easy to administrate.
"...a new global study has revealed that the many CEOs now value technology over people when it comes to the future of their businesses."
Translation: A new global study has revealed that the many CEOs are as fucking greedy as they ever were, and will stop at nothing to increase their wealth by reducing expenses.
Like we needed a study to prove that shit. Spank you Helpy Helperton for pointing out the obvious.
Ironically, another study will come along showing that humans holding the prestigious rank of CEO find themselves invaluable as compared to the technology that could be used to replace them and their inflated self-valuation.
There's very little a CEO does that can't be done by an AI.
Here's the problem . . . . these CEOs who are so in love with A.I./ Robotics are slowly putting themselves out of business.
Once you've eliminated all the workers, and nobody has a job any more (no job = no money), who exactly is going to buy your company's products? Have you considered what happens when 90% of your customers no longer have any money?
And if you think Universal Basic Income is the answer, where do think that money is going to come from? From the businesses and the wealthy? The same people who do everything they can to hide their money and avoid paying taxes? Good luck with that.
s/AI/magic 8-ball/
So if workers are largely irrelevant then very few people will have job or an income..
Who will they sell their products and services to in a world that has a 90% unemployment rate?
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
The CEOs are considering today instead of tomorrow. And they are in competition with all the other CEOs who are doing the same thing. This isn't an omnipresent cabal who universally dictates a single economy. They know there are customers today to buy their items, and they know if they aren't the company providing those items made by robots then someone else will.
Putting your faith in companies to manage the global economy is bad. Those companies are selfish and over-focused. This is exactly why governments exist. They exist to protect the interests of the population as a whole.
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.
Whoosh indeeeeeed!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You and I may be happy with this. But a lot of people will not. People need a sense of purpose; a desire to be needed; to be valuable. Some may find value in free time to pursue artistic endeavors; many will not.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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!"
Whoosh indeeeeeed!
Who keeps flushing the toilet?
Do you ever wonder why the standard work week is only eight hours a day, five days a week instead of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week?
That would be because of unions.
Firstly AI progress is oversold. That is apparent because of who's selling the idea of imminent human being replacements: Tech CEO's. So who inspires the CEO's vision: Futurists. Even when you read the stuff closely. Ray Kurzweil and others are saying the really replacement AI is 40-80+ years off. What they are actually saying is there is a linear move towards more sophistication with censors, actuators and algorithms barring a black swan event where sentient AI is born or some unpredictable breakthrough. So think about that from a policy makers perspective. So we're being sold the inevitability of imminent human replacement when all they mean is: We have a truck that can drive the interstate (not rural roads with pot holes, animal crossings etc) looks like everyone who dries a truck is now redundant. There are a lot of caveats and it would take a naive person be swayed completely by the truth of their arguments.
BINGO!!!
See also Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If you believe UBI won't work then the remaining options are:
1. A luddite economy that prohibits certain forms of automation
2. Killbot-powered genocide of the working class
I assume you're thinking #1?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Software able to make rational business decisions based on compiling numerous sources of data seems exactly like the sort of thing we'd want instead of a CEO.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
why fund it ? Perhaps because educated people make smarter decisions? Worldwide uneducated people out-breed educated people at a rate of about 4:1. Surely a populace less interested in breeding, because they understand the indirect costs, is a benefit worthy of funding higher education for all? If nothing else, I would argue that art (literature, dance, acting, etc. ) benefits from so called higher education. Education, like travel, is broadening; it opens vistas of knowledge and experience to people that go beyond the requirements of the mundane "future job", allowing them to contribute to society in non-material ways.
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.
single payer health care will help a lot in the usa and is needed UBI or not.
K-12 is free or should we have loans for that as well?
What about making education loans have chapter 11 and chapter 7? so the schools and banks have skin in the game.
...If on the other hand, instead of basic income, you had a basic-job as a right (the whole "communism" attempt of the last century), you might have a point (since not all jobs are created equal, allowing some variance for education is useful), ...
Except you're missing the point. What is that "basic job" in a world where every possible job can be done better by a robot than by a human?
Are you proposing something like a WPA? Are you proposing "make work" jobs, where half the people dig holes in the ground, and the other half fill them in? Are you proposing that the government pay businesses to employ people instead of robots (...and then tax the businesses, to give get the money to give them to hire the people?)
The point of higher education is no longer to make people eligible for a job: it is to make them better human beings, and as a side benefit, to give them something to do for five, ten years to keep them off the job market because there aren't any jobs for them, while making them feel valuable in the process.
Because, anything you can do, AI can do better (sing along now): AI can do anything better than you.
Sooooo, it's like blackmail?
You're forgetting what sociopaths like CEOs and politicians prefer to do with irrelevant parasites
Kill themselves?? Hey, we can always hope...
They have fewer customers than MIcrosoft but are much, much more profitable. You can do just fine thank you selling a $2000 PC instead of a $500 one.
And the ruling calss don't need customers when they can claim everything for themselves. The 99% will fall over themselves backward to get a piece of the scraps. They'll be the new kings, deciding who lives and who dies based on who gets to work for them (and who gets food, shelter, health care, etc). And they'll have an automated military to enforce their will. This isn't a hard thing to grasp. You just have to think like a ruler and not like an employee.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Because we're on the cusp of inventing machines that can do every job. That's never happened before.
You and I may be happy with this. But a lot of people will not. People need a sense of purpose; a desire to be needed; to be valuable. Some may find value in free time to pursue artistic endeavors; many will not.
And those people open an ETSY shop, start a Twitch channel, join a band, or fiercely compete over the handful of remaining "real jobs".
The purpose doesn't have to actually be important it juts has to feel important. (for a proof of concept see how important we think everything we do now is even tough objectively none of it has any impact outside an infinitesimally insignificant portion of he universe)
So, when automation is in full force and the only people with jobs are those that have the money to invest in automation, who are they going to sell to?
Never confuse rationality with benevolence.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The whole idea of "Basic Income" is a drive to the lowest common denominator and eventually it will fail as nobody does anything, and no income is being taxed to pay for the people who aren't doing anything.
Confusing. What is it about finding oneself at the lowest common denominator that you feel discourages ambition?
Breakfast served all day!
Basic Income is a horrible idea, that is doomed for all the reasons people don't want to think about.
People do not peacefully starve to death.
If we're going to continue to tie "not starving to death" to employment, we're going to need to do something when employment is no longer possible.
Basic income is one way of dealing with that. Feel free to propose a better one.
I'm pretty sure that STILL doesn't cover the full cost of children. No, if I made an actual net salary/profit making babies, I'd have a frickin' harem ERRR I mean baby factory running here... Face it, you can try to warp reality to fit your narrative, but it's not an incentive if the person is still running at a net loss.
Paying people to bugger off and stay out of trouble is less desirable than locking them in a cage and paying other people to keep them in it?
Interesting.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Who cares if people can be successful artists. The point is that they have the freedom to choose if that's what they want to do with their lives. Being good at it is irrelevant.
The UBI solves the problem of where people are supposed to get money to buy the things that are produced when there aren't enough jobs for humans to do to support the economy.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
You can have a UBI and capitalism. In fact, the time will come soon that it's completely necessary to have a UBI to support capitalism. After all, if there is no demand (money) out there to buy things, all the supply in the world won't matter.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
The problem with the old welfare is that the recipient is made to feel like a parasite. They're not paid enough to DO much of anything but sit in front of the tube and if they accidentally make too much spare change, they end up with less than ever. That's what kills them and makes them bad neighbors.
If the basic income provides enough money to do something and they aren't afraid of accidentally doing too much, they will probably be able to find something better than sitting on the couch. Since everyone would get it, there's no shaming people for it, so they might actually feel like they can be a part of something. It may take a generation to fully work that out, some people are already too damaged by the current system to find their way out of it.
People have generally been able to find a purpose. Our current economic system is what prevents that since they have to make enough money to live before they can even think of something more meaningful to do than make someone else a lot of money.
" but they don't organize collectively to oppose taxes, ..."
Dude, have you ever heard of the Republican Party? Also, US Chamber of Commerce.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
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?
I guess the best word in English that I can come up with here is "relief", because all it does is provide a bit of relief to the person receiving it. The fact that you had latched onto the term "incentive" and how you are so adamant about ending it does suggest to me that you really haven't fully thought out the issue. Even with the relief that the government allots to those with children, our birthrates in the USA have been declining for a long time. Possibly it has to do with nothing more than lower infant and child mortality rates and better education for the masses. And I do believe that this birthrate will continue to decline until the population starts to retract.
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.
I certainly don't think I'd be useless without my current job. I love baking, drawing, painting, hiking, camping, fishing, kite flying, movies, tv shows, books, hanging out with friends, learning new skills and programming. I don't get paid for most of those and the one I do get paid for is only fun about a third of the time. Given my current level of comfort, I'd love to spend an extra thirty hours a week on more of those other things.
Take away any single one of those things I enjoy and I'll spend more time on the others. Heck, take all of them away and I'm confident I'd find new hobbies. Woodworking looks interesting.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Why choose? You can do both!
~X~
"This is why the principle of automation and machine intelligence goes hand in hand with the concept of the Universal Basic Income and free education. So we can create an educated workforce, and those who cannot work have a strong societal safety net that's easy to administrate."
No, it isn't. Under a capitalist society, UBI can only lead to inflation and, because of that, being well below basic coverage (despite of its name).
What we need is Universal Basic *Services*: nothing is easier to administrate: food? free; healthcare? free; shelter? free; education? free.
On one hand, this has already been tested as workable as most countries but USA already successfully provide socialized healthcare and education, and even USA provides socialized government, army or police so it's just a matter of extending already provided services. It is inflation-free, at least on a monetary sense, while not from an expectations point of view: even today, on a country like mine were socialized healthcare works quite well (or it worked quite well, before last decade's explotion of ultraliberalism) there's always the expectation of making it covering more services (i.e.: dental health is not covered) or more areas -i.e.: isn't internet connectivity a necessity right now? maybe we should cover it too...
And, for those lacking either the knowledge or the imagination about how a basically ocious society might end up looking like, just take a History book, as it is not as if it hadn't been tried before: ancient Athens might be a perfect example, and we still remember some of its people and their achievements 2500 years later.
Fecundity negatively correlates with intelligence till retardation cuts off the curve. I'm not a fan of paying idiots to shit litters I also have to pay for, much less when the increasing plurality of irresponsible, parasitic idiots calls itself "the People" then claims to own me and anyone like or even useful me under hallowed mob rule.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."