Slashdot Mirror
'We Need Robots To Take Our Jobs,' Veteran Tech Reporter John Markoff Explains Why (recode.net)
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining. From a report on Recode: "We need the robots for two reasons: On the one side, there are not enough workers," Markoff said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. "The demographic trends are more important than the technological trends, and they happen more quickly. On the other side, there's this thing called the dependency ratio, the ratio between caregivers and people who need care," he added. "For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it'll be up sevenfold, globally."
In theory it's great, in practice it will "hit" people in different ways unevenly, and is part of the reason the rich are getting richer while the rest stagnate.
We don't know how to organize an economy to take advantage of such. We only have theories that have yet to be tested. That means we are guinea-pigs. But if we do nothing, we are still guinea-pigs, because doing nothing means changes in jobs and automation will still impact us, but without any planning.
Such displacement is arguably why T won: he gave a voice to the displaced of the Rust Belt, which are swing states. His reasoning about solutions is all off kilter, but he at least gave the problem top billing.
Managing change is politically tricky.
Table-ized A.I.
Population decline is an issue in many countries, primarily with low birth rates, but I think here they're speaking of the problems with population aging.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
As soon as you can guarantee Basic Income and health coverage for everyone i'd be happy to let a robot take my day job while i go do more interesting stuff instead! However until that happens robots taking over all the jobs would be a disaster.
(I don't care one way or the other if the healthcare is single payer or not, as long as i'm guaranteed coverage at an affordable price, regardless of preexisting conditions.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Corporate-speak translation: "There are not enough highly-educated workers who are cheap, docile, and single so they have no family distractions."
In that sense, yes, there is a shortage.
Table-ized A.I.
... think again: The vast majority of elderly people do not have the monetary resources to acquire some "robot care taker".
All those robot fantasies are based on the illusion that somehow, once there are enough robots around, people will magically start to share their wealth with others in need. It has been proven time and again that this does not happen. Not even with much more basic things like food/shelter/healthcare.
The more likely situation will be that a few robots will aide some rich elderly people, while a lot of armed robots will be in charge of putting down any rebellion from the have-nots.
And I'll explain for you. The minimum wage worker can probably manage the $8.50 meal once in a while. If he loses his job he has $0 to spend on any sort of burger.
That trend will not go well for anyone unless you're prepared to implement a basic income that will allow him to manage that $11.50 meal once in a while.
Your point being? You can hire 5000 dudes in China to dig a ditch. Doesn't mean that you aren't better off with an excavator or other heavy equipment.
"Robots" have been taking jobs for hundreds of years. Water wheels and wind mills have taken jobs of men manually grinding flour. The steam engine took the jobs of horses and people in the field. Hydraulics took the job of people manually manipulating plows. Bigger tractors took the place of more people driving more steam engines.
What used to take a few hundred men with shovels can be done with an operator in a heavy equipment cab. What used to take a few hundred men underground hauling coal and other minerals can be done by a handful of men and heavy equipment. What used to take hundreds of teachers across the US can be done by online courses.
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future. Just like has been done to now.
Does anyone really pine for the days that it took 50+% of our workforce just to make food for the other minority? If so the Amish are 'hiring'. We leave them well enough alone and they make great meats and cheeses for us to buy.
Yeah, look how our culture suffered when the Italians and Irish started coming over with their habbits of having huge families. The people back then even warned us, "the catholics are breeding us out!" but sadly no one would listen.
Or maybe they just all became Americans like the rest of us and it wasnt a problem at all. The vast majority of immigrants acculturate within a few generations. This is incredibly obviouse when looking at American history and can be seen happening today with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants. Most first gens are pretty Mexican in culture, second generation tends to run a wide spectrum and by the third generation they're American as all hell. At least that's what I've seen from every third plus generation American of Mexican descent that I've ever met. In my experience most dont even speak Spanish at that point. (unless they live near the boarder)
So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"Basic Income can never work because it is "central planning" and that has never worked."
No it's not, you're making that up. The government sending its citizens a check every month is not at all the same as central planning of the economy.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Not to mention "idle hands make for mischief". Paying people to sit around and do nothing is dangerous for any society.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In the long-term view of things, that's what I worry the most about, on behalf of humanity in general. In some places in the world (not going to name any names) human life is already seems to be considered virtually worthless. I see a possible future where an aging population is just 'thrown away' like so much garbage, nobody caring whether or not they starve to death or die of disease, because while young, able-bodied people will be a dime-a-dozen because of automation, elderly people, who are not capable of doing much work, will be considered to be a liability to be liquidated. Do you really think anyone wants to live in a world like that? Sadly in some ways we're already there, the elderly are not honored or taken care of, they're dumped into 'homes' that treat them worse than animals, keeping them alive, but quiet, so they continue to get paid for their 'services' to them. Really, seriously, honestly, some of you seem to think that there's going to be some sort of utopia created by all this automation and robotics and fake 'AI', but the reality is already all around us, and it's just going to get worse when people are made more and more obsolete by a corporate world that has no reason to care about people, only profits, and many governments that are not much better, more interested in their GDP than the welfare of old people. When the entire world is run by money, who is going to advocate for these people? Don't act like you don't care, either, because no one is exempt from aging, and saying you'll just kill yourself when you get too old is a lie.
So we should confiscate all the money of the idle rich, most of whom didn't earn it anyway.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The math doesn't work. The worker with $0 income can't afford even a $0.01 burger. Unless you go to universal income, robots are part of the problem.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
how many burgers will that robot of yours buy again? Gourmet or not.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The idle rich are a very small set of people. Most people do something with their lives given the opportunity. And that's the problem we need to solve: giving everyone that opportunity. We as a society suck at vocational training, and we can fix that.
In Germany if you want to work at, say, Mercedes, you'll be an intern on the factory line by 16, having gotten an education specifically tuned for that job and the chance to do the work. By graduation, you're there in that well-paying skilled manufacturing job.
America has over a million high skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled due to lack of trained workers. The companies aren't going to do that on their own -- they aren't schools -- but we as a society can surely work together with those manufacturers to make it happen. But instead we turn up our noses at blue-collar work, dismiss the working class as stupid racists, and generally separate education from labor as far as we possibly can. It won't end well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That didn't work out so well (for the aristocracy) in France. It didn't work any better for the Tsar.
We don't have to break into your bunker. Filling the entrance and vent with concrete will be sufficient.
No. This time it will be completely different. The Muslims will kill us all and then steal our women and then replace our Constitution with Sharia Law. But Trump will stop them!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Thanks to the support of Alex Jones, right?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
H1-B is a great example of this problem. The problem is companies abusing H1-B visas, and the simple solution is to get rid of (or severely limit) H1-B visas. Thing is, you need some level of skilled immigration for any modern economy, and the idea that if companies can't abuse H1-B they will just pay an American a good wage instead of laughable. They will either offshore or they will move to some state with weak employment laws and abuse Americans with low wages and awful conditions.
The more complex solution is to fix the H1-B system to prevent the worse abuse, and then concentrate on making US workers more attractive. Set up new tech hubs and encourage companies to move there, so that their employees can enjoy a reasonable cost of living and thus don't need super high salaries just to pay the rent. Require companies who are having to get H1-Bs in because of lack of local skills to invest in training locals to give them those skills, and encourage them (e.g. with tax breaks) to invest more in apprenticeships.
So on the one hand you have "ban the thing that is a problem, instant solution, problem solved" but doesn't really work, verses "do multiple things over several years and be interventionist, and eventually things will get better". The latter is a much harder sell, especially when the other side is whipping up anger and resentment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC