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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.