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Half the Work People Do Can Be Automated, Says McKinsey (techinasia.com)
Half the work people do in their jobs can be automated, according to a study published by McKinsey Global Institute. From a report: Instead of assessing the impact of automation on specific jobs, the study went to a more granular level by looking at the activities involved in various jobs. The logic is that every occupation has a range of activities, each with varying potential for automation. McKinsey found that 49 percent of the activities people are paid to do in the global economy can be automated with "currently demonstrated technology." That involves US$11.9 trillion in wages and touches 1.1 billion people. The study encompassed over 50 countries and 80 percent of the world's workers. China, India, Japan, and the US accounted for half of the total wages and employees. Not surprisingly, the two most populous countries, China and India, could see the largest impact of automation, potentially affecting 600 million workers -- which is twice the population of the US.
What is the unemployment threshold going to be?
When unemployment caused by automation, robotics, etc reaches 10%?
15%...
20%..?
In the coming decades more and more people worldwide will become unemployable, and they will have nothing to do or any way to make a living?
How are governments and communities going to respond?
Of course half of human work *can* be automated (I'd wager even more than that) -- but isn't the question really whether it's practical to automate those things?
I am shocked to hear this. Completely shocked.
only half?
If I can't work I can't be a consumer. They (rich) had to change how capitalism work or move away from it!.
My job can be automated as soon as someone can create some software that takes multiple sets of ill defined and incomplete specs* and can create a working, tested piece of code that not only does what was written down, but also does what was intended to be written down but never was.
* And in my current line of work there is a set of specs from the final customer, a set of specs from the company that builds the hardware and a set of specs from the company** I am working for that supplies the actual automation. And all of these specs are ill defined and incomplete in their own ways.
** And within that company the group that designs the physical wiring doesn't really converse with the sales critters that bid on the job, or with people like me who end up writing the control software***
*** Maybe they need a "Bender" module to emulate all the swearing I am doing at everyone else?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
A stupid article. Almost everything can be automated, the crucial question is whether it is cost-effective to do so. It is not surprising that a lot of the activities that can be automated concerns workers in China and India, because in most cases, it's simply more convenient not to replace an $2/h organic automaton with a robot.
Here is your anecdote. A friend of mine was working on the manufacture industry. They had a branch in India, and his role was to mentor the product manager of the Indian factory. For a long time, he insisted that the factory in India bought this expensive machinery that they had been used in the Arizona for their production. The factory in India refused to do so by showing that paying 10 people to do the same job, for 100 years, would still be cheaper than actually buying the machinery.
Moral of the story: stupid article, move on.
Automating things is itself work, and when a process or job changes it must be re-automated. If the automation wasn't done in a manner that's easily updated to accommodate minor changes, then the effort to "re-automate" something may approach the level of effort it took to automate it in the first place. So while lots of work may be automatable, the effort require to keep all that work automated on an ongoing basis incurs some amount of overhead.
It's already happening. Some sports reporting has become automated! http://www.houstonpress.com/ne...
To automate all of services would require rewriting ALOT of software which in turn requires years of industry work. For example, I give talks at SpringOne, API World at have had Netflix and other state my work fixes alot of their issues. But they would have to rewrite their existing code... and they invested millions into it. Now regardless that the rewrite might only take a month or so, they want to get their investment back FIRST. So alot of these companies are not going to do that... regardless of the fact that they are LOSING money because they are not automating. Still, at least they are employing people and that makes me happy. To see some of my work on Shared IO state, see my videos from SpringOne on InfoQ (https://www.infoq.com/author/Owen-Rubel)
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And 90% of McKinsey jobs can be automated with a good bullshit generator
I wonder what this does to the political parties in the U.S. It would seem the Republican fare the worst, their view is that if you are poor, you should go find a job. The Democrats have a more share the wealth attitude of taking from the rich, it seems they'd fare better. The Libertarians become mostly unemployed and won't accept a handout, they're toast. The Greens? I guess it depends upon how green the bots are.
But the trend is definitely, if you don't use creativity or deal with humans in a interpersonal way, your job is on a short runway.
I don't know, I prefer Alexa to some customer service reps I've encountered (but definitely not others).
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
None of this is news. Almost all jobs these days exist more for 'coverage' rather than full-on throughput. On an instant-to-instant basis, 90+% of human 'work' time is waiting/transition/communication rather than raw action. You can often tell a long-time professional by how they spend 'in-between' time as much as traditional knowledge domain stuff, there's a sort of performance art folks pick up that's no longer 'looking busy', but instead putting folks at ease when there's nothing else to actively do.
Sure, anything repeated with predictable variance can be increasingly automated. But the job market we've grown into is based on low-balling everyone possible, then selecting the 'expensive' folks based on a random hodgepodge of subjective expectations (largely self-serving for the hiring folks). Automating lets you hire fewer grunt workers for serialized tasks - but it doesn't free you of the need for 'coverage', and it makes a larger portion of your hiring effort the 'expensive hire' style, which is a VERY mixed bag.
Don't get me wrong - almost everything we count as a 'job' WILL eventually be obviated indirectly by automation assuming we don't find a way to stagnate. There's just too much a reward at large scales to automating supply, even when wasteful, and although we'll keep getting waves of demand, it simply won't make sense to spend 40+ hours a week as a workplace like now. We'll find ways of needing less 'people coverage' and more 'system coverage' over time. Greed for time may start pushing back at greed for stuff in the mix of all that.
Ryan Fenton
Automation works great, till it breaks or hits an edge case. Then you need people like me to fix it.
Infact I would say that most computer based automation is so full of flaws, that things need constant babysitting, code updates, etc. Its rare to find an automated system that just keeps on ticking for an entire year without some sort of intervention, let alone multiple years or decades.
And all the best automation costs tonnes of money. Sometimes its just cheaper to hire minimum wage people to do it. But I am all for a push for better and more all encompassing automation (who wouldn't be!). No one should be forced to do mundane or repetitive tasks in the 21st century.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Cut full time down to 30-32 hours and slide it down to 20 over time.
We do not need where jack get's 0 hours and jay is working 60-80 or 40 + 24/7 on call. (covering what used to be done with 2-3 people)
Companies need the willpower and intelligence, and a big fat push, to automate.
Seriously, I work in a job that I am *trying* to automate. My boss wouldn't fire me (small business) and I would get paid more for making things more efficient, plus there's lots of other work we can do.
Problem is, the company puts TONS of limits on their software, so the time it takes to hack around it is obscene. Making their systems easier TO automate would go a long way.
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Yes, but do all these people want to be touched?
My trusty calculator with a dedicated [000] key says the legal settlement could end up costing an exillion dollars.
I'd argue that at least half of what most cube dwellers do all day doesn't need to be done at all. Large corps build of thick layers of corporate sludge over the years, layers to bureaucracy and reporting that is put into place and never re-questioned. Finding a way to clear out that crap would do more for happiness and profit than automation.
I tell teenagers who want to go into IT or computers for a career to only do it if they really want to. If they are doing it for the high salaries, they are taking a big risk.
You will still have a need for low-level customer-service work and high-level design/research work in 20 years.
The mid-level stuff that your run-of-the-mill programmer and system administrator does today will be largely be automated.
Hopefully, new, fun, decent-paying tech jobs that use similar parts of the brain that we haven't even thought of will fill the void.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A new software tool rolled out at my job. The data is automatically generated but the verification of data is done by people. Other groups hired additional people to manually update each entry in the system. My group requested new features like spreadsheet export/import to make bulk changes via scripts. Although the other groups have two to three times as many people, our small group beats their numbers at the end of the month. If other group use our update methods, layoff notices for redundant people becomes inevitable.
The whole point of automating is to not have to employ people. Companies won't buy 100 robots if it takes 100 people to keep them going, that doesn't make sense. It only makes sense if the cost of the human is negligible with regards to the work that the robots can do, which automatically means those repairman jobs you're talking about will be scarce.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Good luck. With 600 million out of work it would be logical to assume an 80 hour a week job with no benefits paying $15/hr is better than 0 an hour. If you don't do it the boss will find some other desperate worker who will. Another cost savings to give to the CEO and MBAs in the form of bonuses
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What will happen, eventually, is war. You get enough people (projected as hundreds of millions all over the world in this case) who are disaffected, disposessed, disregarded, and discarded, who all find a common complaint, and you have the makings of a war. People are not just going to sit and die quietly because they've been 'made obsolete'. The entire idea of people becoming 'obsolete' is absurd.
Governments will do something. Companies will do something, too, because it's in their collective best interests; if no one is working, no one has money to buy products, therefore companies don't have money to buy robots -- or to stay in business. No one to pay taxes, entire national economies fail. The world lapses into chaos. Nope, something will be done. Oh and by the way it won't be this 'universal basic income' nonsense, either, because that'll bankrupt a country faster than anything else possibly could, so you can forget about that, too.
Not going to happen. They will just waste more time. Extend the daily 'stand-up' to 3 hours, add a weekly 'all staff' meeting and the MBAs are done.
How many productive hours are you allowed per week?
I occasionally bitch about the CA department of general services *. But putting all the really useless, net negative workers in one building does have the advantage of keeping them out of the hair of people who actually have work to do. As bad as the current situation is, it's better than distributing those air thieves around the government.
* In CA government you can't fire people, so they transfer the blatantly useless ones to 'General Services'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes it will be great to have an extra 20 hours a week to not make any money, starve, and watch my family die.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Heck, if my Slashdot browsing could be automated - my work efficiency would go WAY up!
#DeleteChrome
What is the carb to protein conversion efficiency of humans? I'd guess, at best, it's worse than any common domesticated animal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It would work. You're assuming the "lazy" will have as much as the people who work have, but no one is suggesting that. The lazy will still have motivation to work because they will be barely living on what they are giving, and the people who work will have nice things and a more comfortable life.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
> What about when it's all kinds of jobs? What happens when you only need 1 human to maintain 300 machines who can each do the work of 500 people?
You can read about what happens, that was the 1980s and 1990s. My grandfather was an accountant. At the time, that meant he was also a bookkeper - he wrote things down in a ledger, and used a desk calculator that spit out paper of the results.
My mom was a computer programmer. She wrote software so computers could do the job that my grandfather used to do. She led a team of people maintaining the computers.
I'm also a programmer. I write systems that allow a cloud-based cluster to do the kinds of things my mom used a datacenter full of discrete machines to do.
Half of what my mom used to do as her job is now automated - I don't have to do those things. For example we have an automated system that runs unit tests on the code as I check it in. I don't have to manually run all of those tests. Partially because half the job is automated compared to her day, my team releases a new version every two weeks, rather than every two years like my mom's team did. We get more productive work done in less time since the drudgery is automated. Because I can do a lot of productive work in a short time, I'm well paid.
I for one would welcome a robot doing half of my work. That would be the half of my work that consists of meetings.
This study says that for the average job, half of it can be automated (the repetitive part).
Fifteen years ago, I would spend one hour writing software, then two hours testing it. Now the testing is mostly automated. I write code and when I check it in the automated system runsva bunch of tests. It then alerts me of any problems revealed by the automated tests. Automating half of my job has meant I can spend more time creating new software and less time testing, while producing higher quality because I never forget to run one of the tests.
pay CEO more money
First job to go. Replaced by a small Perl script.
Have gnu, will travel.
... just so long as nobody develops a robot that can screw up even the simplest of tasks, then blame it on someone else.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You'll still pay the lazy but it will be at knife point instead
Should we automate them? Would it be more efficient if you factor in the costs of civil strife and prisons? Probably not. If you look at it in terms of overall impact it would be a very inefficient way of doing things.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The FULL "work" of Politicians & Government can be Automated. (We don't need no stinking P&G)
We Just put 3 buttons on each home to vote for the decisions that our countries need.
(_)Yes (_)No (_)Maybe
---
Or Where is Skynet when is need it?
We all point at the printing press, steam power, and and the industrial revolution and say "See? this has all happened before, things will be fine, remember the doomsayers of the past", but this IS different.
The level of automation on the horizon will remove workers and employees in great numbers, from all fields, not just the single improved industries as we have seen throughout history. Its going to happen very quickly. Huge swaths of the worlds population will find themselves out of work in a very short time, and even the robots and automation systems that replace them will go dark, as demand drops like a rock.
We can hope that new industries will arise, and the younger generation will find new skills and ways of life that we cannot even conceive of today. But even in the best of these scenarios, it wont be before the huge numbers of workers find themselves desperate and starving, while those with the resources to automate pull more and more wealth from the populations of the world.
We human beings have been marching into the future, improving our lives and adapting technology to replace mundane tasks since the first caveman combined sticks and stones. If we had no other qualities, we would survive this bleak future solely on account of our ability to adapt, and adapt we will, but not without great pains, and drastic change on a scale not seen since the fall of the dinosaur.
In the short term, I suggest learning robotics, investing your children heavily in STEM skills, and building a few small bots of your own. soon, the only meatbags needed need will be those who can maintain the growing legions of steel and circuitry, and those who are willing do the things even our soulless replacements refuse to do.
I know I sound like the doomsayers of the past, and I hope things don't go this way, but the writing is on the wall. This level of change is as unpredictable as it is unprecedented. Good luck to us all.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
There was decades of mass unemployment following the industrial revolution until wars did enough damage and killed enough people. Sorry man, but you're being hopelessly naive.
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For some factory procedures/parts, yes. And critical operations like a new leg prosthetic replacements to a hip with a machine, are more accurate at drilling a tight hole than the doctor can do. But doctors are still there watching.. But full automation with no oversight, NO. Even robots go out of speck, and make mistakes, so I personally feel that it's good to have an experienced inspection person watching over the products and procedures as they progress. That person can instantly stop the line if a fault is found.. Phone calls I personally hate: AI cold calling? Hang up! Or maybe you are trying to get an answer on the phone with an Insurance question that is not on the choices. You need a person for that.. The main thing that angers me is that they use a lot of automation NOT to make your life easier, but to bury you in useless paperwork, take up your extra time, instead of theirs, make you go though extra steps to get the right person, or make you do more work (instead of them) to complete the task, so you end up with less free time.. Regarding making parts that are defective or out of spec. (Do you like to take time out to drive back to the store, and return the defective part?) Many years back, store parts simply worked the first time out of the box.. Now, anything from food devices to computer parts, are found to be dead upon arrival or don't last.
So much for those burger flippers wanting 15 bucks an hour ;)
You're glossing over decades of unemployment, intense poverty and violence used to contain the poor. All of which is completely unnecessary. And You and I won't be richer in 50 years. We'll be dead or dying. That's not hyperbole, that's life expectancy.
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We need another world war to destroy some infrastructure and kill off some people. It needs to be hand to hand combat though, like WW II, not nukes. This will boost jobs, increase spending and reduce unemployment.
So, if most everyone is unemployed, just where are the CEO and MBAs selling what the company makes?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The moral of the story is you can pay people slave wages if there's enough of them out of work.
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Yeah, they have had some rather spectacular failures in consulting/analyst work. Trusting them isn't really any better than trusting a coin toss.
The same can be said of most of these analyst companies of course.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Unfortunately, that's the half that can't be automated with "currently demonstrated technology".
Most "currently demonstrated technology" has a logical framework. Most of what goes in meetings has no logical basis. Ergo, it ain't happening soon.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
and in the usa the prison doctors cover more then the er. Under GOP care that may be your choice under then maybe an $2K-3K /mo cover all plan with caps and limits.
We could easily replace politicians with death robots.
Same net effect.
Half the lies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think I should like to code a small Newsbot that writes stories and posts them to Slashdot. I shall call him McKinsey.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The work I'm actually most concerned about being automated is upper-middle class office work. Otherwise, unless the rules change completely and we stop using money and property as a store of value, economic activity will slowly wind down as people can't buy things and don't feel secure.
I work and have worked in large companies almost exclusively over a 20 year career. In environments like this, you will always have a distribution of abilities and skills. However, doing IT systems engineering work, I tend to agree with this report's findings. There are tons of jobs that could easily be automated with a little work. In banks I've worked at, as an example, there are people whose sole job is to accept documents mailed and faxed in for mortgage verification, enter the information into a computer, and take a fixed switch...case type action based on inspection. There used to be tens of people processing checks on two or three shifts. These jobs and hundreds more are the equivalent of an assembly line skill level, just working with paper or electronic files. Outside of the paper-processing world are tons of questionably-useful jobs in sales and marketing -- things like coordinating trade shows and putting out press releases. Across the organization are things like liaisons, project managers, business analysts, and other jobs that simply involve taking information from one group and passing it along to another. Yet, these jobs pay middle class salaries and give average-ability people something to do, regardless of how much raw revenue or cost saving they add.
I think a lot of the instability we see now is what's currently happening in companies - these simple jobs are either being eliminated or offshored in the desire for companies to save a few bucks here and there. The typical occupant of these jobs is a product of the last 30-40 years' obsession with sending everyone to college instead of giving them a trade or skill-based education. I went to a large state university, and back then just as now, they were pumping out thousands of generic business majors into the job market, most of whom were/are the typical C student partying their way through school. Here's the difference between then and now -- back then, that C student would just roll up to the career counseling office during their senior year. Recruiters from big companies would interview them, they'd get a couple offers, and accept some random entry-level position. Now, no one's hiring the C students and even the A and B students are having trouble finding that first job. (I was a B student, but that was in a hard science and I worked full time.) Fast forward, and that C student is working their way up the ladder with salary increases along the way -- paper pusher associate, senior paper pusher, supervisor of paper pushers, Manager of Bulk Pulp Transport, Director of Document Services...
The problem now is that the ladder is broken for an increasingly large swath of the population. Once the career progression is gone, that kills the salary increases that occur over time and allow for things like buying a house. 30 year mortgages are painful in the beginning but are supposed to get easier as you age because your income is expected to increase. Car manufacturers can't sell cars to people who don't feel comfortable enough in their jobs to take out a car loan or spend a little extra for a non-base model. And, companies can't sell products to their employees if the employees are worried about whether the axe will fall tomorrow. This squares with everything we've been hearing about Millenials - they don't want a car mainly because they can't afford one, they don't want to own a home because they're not secure in their employment, etc.
In my mind, this is why we got Trump. His rhetoric about rolling the clock back to the late 1940s was an easy sell for blue collar workers, but I think enough white collar workers took a hard look at their situation and remembered stories from their parents/grandparents about times when companies showed loyalty, when th
Here is how this works in the real world. If half the work people do starts being automated, that creates new jobs, on top of the new jobs that are continuously being created by new markets and new fields. If there really is a glut of work force due to automation, the simple solution is to cut the work week down to 32h and require all companies to pay hourly for everyone below the executive level (essentially eliminate salaried workers) and make overtime 2.5x base rate to start and go up from there after the first two hours.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
No matter how many programmers there are, if adding me at $150,000 produces $500,000 in value, you should do so.
Protip: Leave an inflatable love doll in the meeting, dressed in some of your old clothes. 90% of meetings are just some PHB making speeches, he won't know the difference.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do we really need to read trash published by this company.
"A 1997 article and a book it published in 2001 on "The War for Talent"...The authors found that the best-performing companies were "obsessed" with acquiring and managing the best talent. They advocated that companies rank employees by their performance and promote "stars", while targeting under-performers for improvement or layoffs. After the book was published, Enron, a company which followed many of its principles, was involved in a scandal that led to its bankruptcy."
But hey just look at these insightful statements from the article:
"Automation is happening, and it will bring substantial benefits to businesses and economies worldwide"
"...machine learning have put us on the cusp of a new automation age"
"Automation will change the daily work activities of everyone..."
Hello the Industrial Revolution is calling, they want their insights back. Perhaps they have some pithy quotes from Eli Whitney. Jackasses...
Why. Just replace the workers with robots. No need to cut the work week.
I'm starting to think these reports have been generated via automation, too.
> . If so why are you "paid" (as in employed) rather than owning all of the massive value you add (by being a founder / owner)?
I've founded a few companies. One I sold for a good price. One I still own. I haven't been an executive, or an employee, of that company for four years, just the owner, because I add more value an as engineer than I do as an executive. I'm better at designing really cool tech systems than I am at running a company. Also, I don't *want* to work 60 hours. I want to work 40, so I work 40 doing what I'm good at. Other people who don't know a stored procedure from a packed structure are good at running a company and want to spend 60 hours/week doing so, so I let them do that.
As well as owning 100% of the stock in the company I founded, I'm also an owner of Google, Autozone, and dozens of other companies (in other words, I save for my retirement in mutual funds). Owning the companies is completely separate from, and irrelevant to, my daily work.
> You're lucky, and your circumstances can change. The perceived value that you add may not be recognized by different people in the future.
For the last 20 years, I've been able to keep an eye on major trends, pivoting to where the demand is increasing. I suspect I'll be able to keep doing so. Thanks for your concern, though. On luck, luck is probability * habits. If you make it a habit to drive without your seatbelt, probability says you'll probably eventually get injured when you're in a car wreck. You'll say you were unlucky to get injured in a wreck. If your habit is to talk behind people's back, probably one day when a colleague you've gossiped about becomes your boss or whatever, that'll come back to bite you. You'll say you were unlucky that the person who hates you got the promotion. If you make it a habit to try to be helpful to colleagues, when a colleague you've helped becomes the boss you'll say it's lucky that the new boss is your friend. Yes, I'm "lucky", I try to cultivate those habits that will, when the time comes, bring good things my way.
Fine with me, to replace half of all workers with machines, robots, and web apps. As long as half of all housing, half of all the food we eat, half of all our clothing, half of all personal and public transportation, can be paid for in ways other than earning an income.
we accomplished this by webex, you just join the meeting and go on about your life, all is well.
Every few months advances in hardware and software will be able to replace an ever higher percentage of human workers. Make note that our politicians are not making preparations for the unstoppable changes about to befall us. One huge problem is that the public does not want to be aware of what is happening even though if we do not adapt we will perish.
No, complete idiots like yourself display the point of the insults. (Hint: The construction trades are *not* unskilled.)
What part of "less and less as the years go by" was too complicated for that wad of half rotten cabbage you carry between your ears?
It's not your job that needs eliminating, its the 4 hours a day that you spend doing BS because your system sucks that need eliminating. If you are in a large corporation half of what you do every day is not the job you were hired for. You spend 50% of your time in compliance activities. Transferring data from one system into another because they won't talk to each other, or your manager wants his own spreadsheet rather than using the "corporate" version because the columns are not in the right order. Or "the only reason I printed this out was to take it over here to scan in back in" because there is no connection between the system with the data and the document storage platform in use. Maybe its the "I need a wet signature on this" because your company won't take an electronic signature. Every company has thousands of these types of things. The longer your company has been in business, the more of these there are. If you think your job has BS activities that you should not have to do, that's in the 50%.
to make them compete with machines? Studio apartments? 2, 4 people to a studio? No running water? No electricity? How about food insecurity? How far down will you push them just so you can maintain the puritan work ethic and so you can claim the spoils of civilization yourself? History says you'll let them starve. Or if you won't you'll lose out in the marketplace to someone who will.
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talking about this now. The next gen of automation will be flexible and it will adapt. It'll use complex AIs, improved materials and robotics to allow processes to change rapidly as needed. It took about 50-70 years longer to get to this point than we thought. But we're just about there. There's some algorithms to work out and we need slightly better batteries and materials. All of which are available and just waiting new processes to mass produce. This is all in the pipeline; and not that joke pipeline about how when a scientist says it's 5 years off he means he's done the fun part. It's coming soon. 20 years tops.
This happened before in the 1800s and we didn't do anything. I wish we'd actually do something this time...
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Automating half of labor would severely hit people's ability to buy goods. I am not sure today's capitalism would survive such a surproduction crisis.
Problem is: there is no alternative model on the shelf ready to be deployed. Result will not be pretty.
> Slashdot would become a cesspool of bots arguing and trolling each other.
As opposed to a cesspool of fanbois arguing and trolling each other.
Ok, got me. But I need the beauty rest for the heavy lift on the other half that no one else ever figured out.
Workers need to own and operate their own automation.
For everybody to enjoy the benefits of automation we have to BYOD.
I do and I'm a happy guy now.
Go well
It means that we need to work half for the same standard of living.
It hardly matters. 600 million under / un-employed people still need to eat. Without a universal basic income the depression and unrest this will cause will dwarf anything seen before by anyone alive since WWII.
Only boring people are ever bored.