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US Workers Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots (cnn.com)
There's a surprising prediction for the next 15 years from the world's second largest professional services firm. An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Millions of workers around the world are at risk of losing their jobs to robots -- but Americans should be particularly worried. Thirty-eight percent of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, according to a new report by PwC. Meanwhile, only 30% of jobs in the U.K. are similarly endangered. The same level of risk applies to only 21% of positions in Japan.
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."
You mean machines that will accept deposits and dispense cash from my accounts? That's just crazy talk.
We found a way to replace worthless salespeople who prey on others and steal retirement money through deceptive practices and absurdly high overhead rates. Do the robots have big mustaches to twirl? Regardless, I can think of better things to do with those jobs than "replace" them. Also, the article is an empty shell. Would it kill CNN (or slashdot for that matter) to include things like references, facts, and arguments to back up conclusions?
Hey IT workers, how does it feel being replaced by Ramesh Patel, who is from a nation where 600 million people shit in the streets?
There are suites of jobs which are at risk in high wage earning countries. Hopefully yours won't be one of them. Lets face it we're about to be exposed to the largest revolution in earning power that the world has ever seen.
Drive a truck or buy a PC to do it for you.
Deliver pizza's or buy a PC to do it for you.
Deliver financial advice or buy a PC to do if for you
Assist with inventory or buy a PC to do it for you
Drive a tractor or buy a PC to do it for you....
Get the picture...
I can understand replacing simple tasks, but complicated ones? It's difficult enough to find maintenance techs owning anything more than a pair of channel-locks and a cresent wrench. Programming a robot to perform diagnostics, mechanical or electrical will become a nightmare. Being able to correlate dissimilar concepts on machine failure to effect a proper and effective repair is daunting. After 45 years of experience, I still find myself learning something new, or re-learning a better way. Don't even get me started with constant retooling.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Far too complicated for a machine to pick up.
What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
This is fantasy of course, but if I could afford a robot with even most of my abilities as an employee but who could work much longer hours only needing to be taken offline for maintenance occasionally think of it!
Of course, then there will be pressure to upgrade my robot because after a few years it will be surpassed by newer more capable models.
How will my robot compete with all the technological advances of newer robots?
And then there's that four year life span.
If that isn't planned obsolescence, what is?
So you're telling me my robot will be "more human than human", but that it "may develop its own emotional responses" but after 4 years it's "time to die"?
How expensive is the basic pleasure model?
"we're already holding the receipts for these robots in our hands.... just felt like giving you folks a heads up, so that you might find other work and have money to spend on the goods these robots will be producing"
Regardless if people fight the idea or not, automation and AI decimating the concept and capability of human employment is no longer science fiction. And when US states started crying out for $15 minimum wage rates, the initial response back from corporations was to look towards automation, because that option was now worth the investment.
Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.
We keep talking about UBI, which is another concept that will become inevitable as automation and AI decimate human employment. The problem lies with funding UBI, which will likely be done through taxation. Unfortunately, corporations are some of the worst entities when it comes to actually paying taxes by employing armies of lobbyists to minimize or hide those obligations, with the end result being trillions sitting in offshore tax havens today. Since this will never change, unending Greed will all but guarantee that UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.
You can forget the American Dream. You can forget the Human Dream. The reality of automation and AI is a global Welfare state, all because of Greed.
It would be just like in the USA before the civil war of secession, where you can buy and sell slaves. The rich people get access to slaves, and those slaves displace the workers who would otherwise get paid.
The robots are not here to take our jobs, but instead to protect us.
This has been known since the beginning of the century, as described in this documentary.
I mean, who wants do do those menial jobs of transporting and feeding older people ? Especially in the ones in multi-story buildings.
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I have spoken with many people about why basic income is really the only way we can go unless we want the government to take all our land and go full communism (hint: that works out very badly). The major resistance always comes down to basic income being "welfare" even in spite of the fact that removing all other welfare is part of the basic income strategy and pays for it pretty effectively. So many people who have jobs and a home and a decent life and worked hard to get there just can't stomach the idea that the government might give people who haven't done any work $15K a year for doing nothing at all. There is a serious inability to look past themselves and consider that not everyone had their starting circumstances or had those paths available or is even capable of doing the same thing. "If I can work hard and make a good life for myself, they can too. If they're not where I am then it's entirely because they are [insert dismissal here, usually lazy]."
Hey, Captain High Horse! I see you have a lot of nice things in your home that you worked hard for and want to keep. So you don't want the government to take action to reduce crimes of necessity, right? Enjoy having your property at higher risk of theft, then! It's the path you chose!
We have to stop looking at ourselves or people richer than ourselves as some sort of template that all people could fit into if they just weren't lazy ignorant pieces of shit. Some people are just inherently smarter or better or more driven than other people. It's an uncomfortable fact of life. At some point the middle class will be totally hollowed out and the magical dismissal of the lazy other will give way to hatred for those in power that "allowed this to happen." Why do we need to suffer so mightily before we address the problems that are practically beating us over the head every single day?
You're asking people for introspection, in a society where a car is a symbol, not a vehicle.
Mostly random stuff.
What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
You can. You just have to buy shares of a company and vote for a board that will fire employees and replace them with machines and algorithms in order to increase dividends.
The caveat is that you need to have so much money that you already don't need to work. If you don't, then you'd better vote for universal basic income, because those who have will do anything to increase their dividends, including replacing you with machines and algorithms.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
The difference is that slaves are expensive. Their cost doesn't go down. Robots will be cheap and commonplace commodity.
And this will make it impossible to extract rent by owning robots and leasing them out, as the GP pointed out.
I understand and accept that jobs that rely on someone simply following a process given down by management, without needing to apply judgement or on-the-spot thinking, is a piece of very low hanging fruit for automation. Baristas, fast food counter staff, checkout/till staff in supermarkets etc. are, as we already know, all going to find their jobs disappear in the near future.
However, many skilled jobs make use of IT systems for data analysis and calculations, where much of the setting up is still done by a squishy human on a PC in an office paid a high salary for their work and knowledge in using the system and explaining the results to clients. Many professional services firms are already automating much of the calculation and systems work to other countries, or to a computer.
Many first world governments are actually encouraging ways to make such work more standardised and easier to automate. The UK government's consultation into the way final salary pension schemes in the UK are valued every three years is one such example, although you have to really dig into the detail of the green paper to find it:
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
Many of these highly paid staff will see themselves as safe from automation, but their bosses certainly don't.
Five years from now, there won't even be such a thing as a "job". The Singularity (emergence of artificial general intelligence) is imminent. Once we have AGI, we have an unlimited workforce. When the supply of "workers" goes to infinite, the price goes to zero. With wages at zero, all goods and services become free.
The future is brighter than most can imagine.
You buy your first robot, then you have your robot build you another robot. You then have two robots. Then you have them build another one, and another one. You have three robots devoted to gathering resources for you (whether by a "job" or directly through mining/manufacturing), while your home AI researches more advanced robotic designs, collaborating with and improving on designs being continually posted and refined on the internet for free. While this is going on, your remaining spare robots are producing fab facilities in your basement (you might not have realized it, but they build a basement so they have space to work-it has 153 sub levels and reaches down to the bedrock).
The pleasure model is free, because your robot army will build it for you from raw materials. It won't be "basic", but rather a perfect imitation of a human being (or whatever) either designed to your specifications, or designed by your home ASI to satisfy your values in ways you can't even begin to comprehend, much less vocalize.
Good luck buying robots to generate an income for you when you don't have a job and everything about the robot is locked down with drm, patents, and proprietary details. Not to mention the overwhelming workload that would be required to keep it running, unlikely that it's even feasible for a single person. Best you could hope for is to earn the smallest amount of money possible while giving the lions share to large mega corporations.
The government already owns your land. You certainly don't. Stop paying the government the rent ("tax") on it and you'll find yourself out on the street with the property locked to you and being immediately offered to others. Citizen land ownership is an illusion in the USA.
If you're always in possession of enough capital such that you can always afford the rent ("tax"), you can be reasonably certain that you may be able to stay where you are. Otherwise, no. And even if you do always have the rent ("tax") available, you still can't be sure that the government won't take it for some other reason -- for instance, they took my home for a supposed dam project (Tock's Island Dam), giving them the excuse that they "needed" to. Which dam they never built, and changed into a "park."
Once you've experienced the process at work, all the illusions about citizen's owning land go away. I speak with absolute authority on this matter. You don't own the land.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
AGI is not going to give us an infinite supply of workers. It'll give us an even larger supply of free-willed individuals. They're not going to be any more willing to do drudge work than humans are. Probably less.
LDNLS constructs, non-intelligent but highly capable, are the incoming infinite worker force. They're already present, and getting more sophisticated by the day. Rapidly.
The singularity has been relatively soft-edged; people don't realize they're in it yet. But they are.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you use drones/robots/self-driving cars or some combination of them they will have to get just a tiny bit more advanced to get to that level.
FTFY
Look around you / do a little search engine work. We have walking robots, ramp-ascending robots, stair-climbing robots, door-opening robots, button-pushing robots, robots with internal cargo storage, robots that can navigate offices and homes. Right now.
That stuff doesn't even have to be developed at this point, it just has to be aggregated. As the financial case has now been made to do it, it's going to happen very quickly. Within ten years, max.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The Moravec's paradox of jobs
This is just another aspect of de-skilling. Since the 1990's the fad has been for people to perform "processes" rather than jobs. The idea being that so long as you adhere to the "process", all your actions will be of the same high quality as your co-irkers. Ha!
But as soon as you are able to write down a formal description of your job, you have effectively written a computer program for doing it. So the most easily replaceable jobs will be the ones that require little judgement, little experience (esp. when there is no possibility of having to deal with exceptions) and simple interfaces to other "cogs" in the great machine.
So if you can replace a personnel officer with a computer, then companies will do it. Just feed in the parameters for the sort of people you wish to hire. Merely give the machine stock replies to the most common workplace complaints. Give it an algorithm for employee assessment - and let it it do its thing. It won't replace the entire personnel dept. But if it can perform the mundane operations, it should considerably cut the number of actual people required to support the company.
And it it this reduction - rather than complete replacement - of mid-level and managerial posts that is where the job losses will occur.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Bozena crowd-control bulldozer (previous article) has arrived just in the nick of time.
That's exactly how I designed the plumbing in my home. You can get at every inch of plumbing, and where it transits a wall or floor, you can unhook it and pull it right through if you need to. The only in-wall plumbing in the entire home is for the shower, and the shower was emplaced on the back face of the wall the refrigerator is pulled up to; pull the refrigerator out, and you're looking directly at an open wall face containing the shower plumbing, just stick a wrench on it and do what you need to do. All sink plumbing and toilet plumbing is direct to the basement through the floors, and presents zero access challenge for service.
I did the electricity in a similar manner; it was even easier to design, due to the physical flexibility of the wiring and its relatively lower demands on space.
Houses don't have to be designed to have difficult to access utilities. Likewise a lot of other conventional approaches can be improved, such as insulation, wall thickness, concrete grades, mutability of internal space. If you ever get a chance to put a home together, it's entirely worth your time to think about things like these before agreeing to anyone's plans.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Americans are against getting financial assistance or any other kind of "hand outs", so it will be interesting to see how we adapt to this.
I think it will be a mess, because we're not likely to plug the legal loop hole around robots. You don't have to pay wages to a robot, they don't pay income taxes, they don't spend their earnings in the local community, and the employer doesn't have to buy robots healthcare. The way public companies are legally required to operate in the interests of their shareholders (profit) will probably make it difficult for corporations to not buy robots. If it saves them money on the books and increases productivity, they don't have a choice, it's just good business.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We should form a government that is ran by the people and for the people, instead of the faceless adversary that you make it out to be.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Eminent domain is supposed to be a process to consolidate property for a purpose that serves the public good. It almost never works out that way. Usually a state or local government use the laws to rip people's homes away from them and hand it over to some special interest.
Indeed, I know I don't own my house or the land it sits on. Not only can someone file some paperwork and take it away from me. If I stopped paying my property tax for long enough, I would be removed and my house auctioned off. Private property is an illusion.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The knock-on effect of automation will make more people stay at home, reducing the need for services like kindergartens. Same goes for other businesses when people return to their homes and do more stuff themselves: Looking after their children, cooking more at home, gardening, cleaning and such.
Just guessing here, but if I'm right, this may not be all bad. Back to the fifties? ;)
Mmm... anyone think that a global accountancy firm might be somewhat biased in their reporting on this subject? The most helpful and interesting article I've found to date has been this review of a report that seems to be fairly rational: https://3starlearningexperienc...
Slaves are only expensive when you buy them from a slave trader or if you follow their pricing model. Also, Irish slaves tended to be cheaper than black ones, thus you can easily take a cheaper option if you so desire.
Even cheaper is kidnapping someone (e.g. Solomon Northup), and using forged papers to claim slave ownership.
In a world where no one works, and no one earns income - who is left to buy the output of the robots?
Capitalism driven production REQUIRES consumers with disposable income. The one cannot exist without the other. To save capitalism, you need to save the consumer.
if it's been going on for 20+ years, I'd say it's more than a "fad"
The US pays wages that limit our ability to compete in world trade. Going to automation and robotics will be far more invasive than the article mentions. The second point in the article is deadly in error. The non working will simply not quietly starve to death or live in want. They will rebel. The root nature of our economy will change to support these folks or we will cease to exist. There are a few sociologist who are working on this issue but getting the public to change their views and beliefs will not be easy.
Mmm-hmm. Well, if you can't keep track of your spending, I suppose that'd be a reason to want to have others do it for you. I don't have that problem, personally, so it's difficult for me to emphasize with your use case. As for needing to show where you were... who do you need to show this to? The very fact that you think you need to show it to someone is worrisome, and speaks more to the problem than any solution.
Because the government thinks it's perfectly okay to directly violate the constitution that authorizes its existence, that's why. Because the government is trying to look at the people's persons, houses, papers and effects without warrants, that's why. Because the government will, if given a chance, interfere with personal and consensual choices it has absolutely no ethical reason to concern itself with, that's why. Because the government runs a system of unjust gulags, driven by a manifestly corrupt legal system, which one should avoid with great care, that's why.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You mean like H1B visa workers?
The civil war was quite expensive.
Kindergarten isn't just child care. Kids do learn basic things like numbers and letters, and what planets there are in the solar system (but we have to teach about Pluto at home, of course... not lettin' that one go), although they aren't exactly tested on anything. But what they really lead is how to function socially in larger groups than at home. I've seen kids repeat kindergarten not because they were stupid, but because they lacked the maturity to be able to be in a classroom setting. By the time 1st grade starts, there are certain expectations. Kindergarten is, more than any other "grade", preparation for the next year, when the real learning begins.
So even if fewer parents work, they should still be sending their kids to kindergarten.
There is no reason this should surprise anyone. High wages, infrastructure to support, and a lot of jobs that have not already been automated (like Japan) or are mandated to not be automated. Japan has government mandates that create jobs like parking lot attendants and construction workers (who are in a constant state of tearing down and rebuilding).
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says it's 50-100 years out.
corporations are some of the worst entities when it comes to actually paying taxes
The real problem is that corporations can easily move to countries where the tax burden is lighter. And if their entire operation: whether manufacturing, services or simply annoying people by phoning them up - is automated, it becomes even easier. These corporations are not "sticky": they are not bound to a specific geography, unlike people who tend to put down roots, dislike disrupting their kids' education by moving school, dislike moving to other countries where they don't speak the language and generally dislike change in general.
So for those companies, they can effectively play one tax-collecting country against another: getting deals, moving to the lowest tax-rate region, engaging in "creative" practices. There is already a question among economists of why corporation taxes are already non-zero (ans: probably because political stability, low corruption, "friendly" laws and lack of a nearby war are attributes worth paying for). It would seem reasonable that companies would seek to minimise any robo-tax they were subject to. Especially as it would be difficult for a single country to implement - they'd just see all roboticised industries leave.
I suppose the next thing would be for corporations to buy their own, independent, islands and set themselves up as sovereign states.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Robots are cheap and available today (you can buy remote controlled robotic toys for less than $100). The only problem is the control issue, which will be solved by AGI. Everyone, including homeless people, has access to ANI that is very close to state of the art on their smartphones. Why do you think this will suddenly change when we get general intelligence?
If one company gets AGI and holds it back, another company will develop it soon after. All this stuff gets published and most of it is available for devs to tinker with.
AGI is very different from logical programs. There is no need for any sort of advanced maintenance. Just the occasional replacement of failed or failing parts and maybe an upgrade here or there.
You are obviously too young to know that CNN, along with all major media outlets, are pretty much just hyperbole machines. They want eteballs and advertising dollars, nothing more or less. New advances also tend to create new areas of work and expertise that didn't exist before. I think the reality will likely be a mixture of both. This is nothing at all new (though I understand it may be the first time you personally have experienced this aspect of life on earth). Yawn. The social media mentality (note I said 'mentality'. The tools themselves are inert until we misuse them) is what will royally f*ck us, not technology. Our entire species is very, very sick at present. Thanks, Zuck, Kim, and the rest. :P
There are a number of ways this could play out.
If the robotic means of production are owned by the few - the remaining many may simply revert back to a barter system (you reload ammo for me and I'll grow food for you...etc).
The other possibility is that the robotic means of production become SO cheap that everyone owns a robot to take care of their immediate needs. It's a futuristic stretch of the imagination, but think of a 3D printer on steroids - the robot(s) build your house, grow your food, treat your medical needs...etc.
That would be an interesting way of distributing the methods of production among all.
The dystopian "robots take all the jobs away" option doesn't seem all that likely.
I am not should be particularly worried because I do not fear losing their jobs to robots because I am higher-skilled workers. See, there is no need for people to fear Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots . ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.
So why are the U.S. jobs more at risk? They seem to think what the tellers do is simpler than the "international finance" people.
But simpler does not mean more automatable. In theory bank tellers across the U.S. could have been replaced long ago by the ATM - but as we all know ATMS are everywhere and that has not happened. What is left for tellers to do at this point is the one thing that is going to take longest to really automate - personal human to human services.
Sometimes a bank customer use has a question and an ATM cannot just answer that. In fact I just got a higher end credit card and one of the features it offers is that calling the 800 number immediately connects you to a human - no voice menu. Automation was supposed to be the end of that kind of thing but it just led to higher end jobs.
Meanwhile those fancy "international finance and investment banking" jobs sound like much more specialized jobs which means they are more open to automation, and probably doing a better job at it since there are no language barriers for computers (though system barriers may be similar, they only need to be overcome once rather than per employee).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The kindergarten, valuable as it is, was just an example of possible knock-on effects. There's a social side to it, but also an economic. How to pay for a service when unemployed and with lots of free time and the skills to do it yourself.
That's when we switch to either denying entry to the market if they don't pay taxes or just set up import tarriffs. One way or another, they will pay because the market is just too big to write off.
Unfortunately robots can in the long run be more cost effective. They don't get sick, take vacations, go on maternity leave, strike, ask for raises, or need benefits.
The neglected downside to robots is what happens to the displaced workers who go on welfare, can't afford to buy products, homes, or cars, and basically become a burden rather then productive. Not every displaced worker will find other employment and even if they do its probably in the service sector where wages are averaging lower. With a world population growing, using robot's to replace human jobs just doesn't work out in the long run.
Wages will need to rise again, and standards of living will dip unless and until the wages rise enough.
What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
Won't work. Prices of labor will fall to a point where a robot is barely able to sustain itself on the income.
We develop software to do human work...but getting management to invest in automating our own damn build process is like pulling teeth! Don't even get me started on the amount of manual regression testing that humans execute every goddamn day.
My job is absolutely safe from automation, because my bosses are idiots.
Tell me, which one of you would rather speak to a person? For a bill over the phone? Ordering at a restaurant? Buying a car? A human or a bot? I guess if you have social anxiety disorder this would be great news to you. You may say: "Now it's just going to be the repetitive jobs.." Ahh! But the pendulum does not stop in mid swing!!
Robots are cheap and available today
Nobody's going to hire your robot to do their work, if they can just get their own cheap robot to do it, and pocket all the profits.
That's when we switch to either denying entry to the market if they don't pay taxes or just set up import tarriffs. One way or another, they will pay because the market is just too big to write off.
Market? Oh right, those things that used to exist when people had money to spend?
I'm worried that even UBI will be like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titantic. We're living in "interesting times" & I doubt things will end well. Unfettered Capitalism looks like it'll lead to a dystopia - for 99.9% - that makes Mad Max look good.
Do we have anyone in power trying to work on a solution? If single payer healthcare in the US isn't getting bipartisan support, how on earth are the larger changes required to handle mass unemployment going to happen?
I'm glad that I'm old enough that I may just miss the coming $&^#storm. I feel very sorry for the next generation ... the promise of the future is so VERY bright (dawn of a new age & all that), but short-sighted greed & political-positioning is going to blow it for us all.
Robots are a good thing. This means the profits will stay here, and the jobs fixing robots will stay here.
If you work for a US company that looses money, your job will go overseas. But instead if the robot helps keep your company in business, you might be able to transfer to another job and keep you wage and vacation.
Tooâ many negative short sighted people. We won't solve the world's problems by being inefficient.
Every once in a while these stories come up. Twenty dollars says the people who made this prediction have never made a living doing any of the work they're predicting is prone to automation. So of course without any intimate appreciation of the finer details of the work, they can blithely declare that it's ripe for automation. Or outsourcing. RodenberryTopia, here we come!
And yet, in $CURRENT_YEAR, everything from cell phones to airliners are still hand-assembled. Yes, there is mechanical assistance, and electronic aid so that what used to take twenty men can be done by one or two, but even in the most automated of Japanese or South Carolina car factories, there are still people employed. What the automation has meant is that production has ramped up and product costs have gone down to the point where every household can aspire to have has can have two or three Lexuses or BMWs in the driveway and a plane ticket to the other side of the planet is no longer the province of the ultra rich. More cars and more planes means more people working at more factories. It balances out.
But if you sit on your ass in a cubicle and operate an Excel spreadsheet all day, these are just numbers and abstractions for you. So you can plug them into an equation someone else has given you and conclude that we'll all have nothing to do come next decade. Pathetic.
went from 20 traders and two programmers to two traders and 20 programmers
The great news there for us technical folk is that if 20 programmers are working today, you can be sure they will need 40 in a few years to clean up the mess the 20 left.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What if I could purchase a robot that could go out and earn a living for me?
This is fantasy of course, but if I could afford a robot with even most of my abilities as an employee but who could work much longer hours only needing to be taken offline for maintenance occasionally think of it!
Of course, then there will be pressure to upgrade my robot because after a few years it will be surpassed by newer more capable models.
How will my robot compete with all the technological advances of newer robots?
And then there's that four year life span.
If that isn't planned obsolescence, what is?
So you're telling me my robot will be "more human than human", but that it "may develop its own emotional responses" but after 4 years it's "time to die"?
How expensive is the basic pleasure model?
Something you purchase and makes a living for you already exists. It's called shares.
If you have a $1 million dollar in shares, you can pay yourself 4% of it and your value of the shares does not diminish. So, 1 million will make you $40,000/yr equivalent to today's salary for the rest of your life.
"There's a surprising prediction for the next 15 years"
Wow! That's a shocker! Let's see now . . . Bank of America just built three new branches, full automated, no humans need apply --- Café X in San Fran is fully automated, no human barristas wanted --- Goldman Sachs used to employ 600 cash equity traders, but due to automation today only employs 2 --- Rolls Royce recently came out with an operating system for super container ships which requires no crew!
The automated weaponry of the rich, with perfect aim, less vulnerability to bullets, lots of ammo, the latest technology, drone surveillance, and infrared night vision, will quickly crush any opposition from the poor.
There will be no successful rebellion. There will be the people who control resources and those who don't. Those who don't will be killed at the whim of the rich and will live only with such meager resources that the rich don't want for themselves.
Recent events (Stuxnet, Mirai) and revelations (wikileaks) indicate just how vulnerable software-dependant systems are to unauthorized control and manipulation. Count on the robots being hacked.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Thousands of workers fired after training H1B India replacements
Spread this news as the globalist are trying to kill it.
Read the stories, scary stuff and then sign the petition to stop it.
http://twitchy.com/wa-37/2017/03/19/digging-your-own-grave-60-minutes-and-michelle-malkin-take-a-look-at-the-h1b-visa-program/
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/youre-fired/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/the-bogus-high-tech-worker-shortage-how-guest-workers-lower-us-wages/
http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/21/technology/h1b-visa-program-flawed/
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/pr/twelve-defendants-plead-guilty-marriage-and-visa-immigration-fraud
https://www.change.org/p/attorney-general-of-the-united-states-stop-h-1b-discrimination-against-americans?source_location=minibar
Since the 1800s, robots started taking over human craftsmanship jobs:
- making cloth
- making glass bottles
- making paper
- farming
- making nails and horse shoes
- making cars
- making (just about anything)
Since the 1900s, robots started taking over human service jobs:
- typing documents
- filing documents
- sending messages (postal service)
- handling financial transactions
- store clerks (e-commerce web sites)
- marketing
- distributing news
I'm sure there are many more jobs that have been automated, that I've missed. Yet somehow we have very close to "full" employment. Our collective standard of living is higher today than ever, even for the poorest among us.
The robots are coming, this is true. I say this is a good thing! We humans have brains, we will find something better to do than the drudgery that the robots are taking over for us.
The "Labor Theory of Value" says that the value of an item is equal to its labor input component.
That's a nice theory - but ignores the concept of scarcity. Even if you have unlimited energy (which we don't) and unlimited labor (provided by robots in theory), you still have the problem of scarcity of materials.
Our economic world has unlimited demand. Humans generally are not satisfied with what they have and want more. Scarcity of materials will still require some sort of cost structure to satisfy the supply/demand curve.
So long as humans compete for scarce resources, there will need to be an economic system to facilitate that. Free labor won't eliminate it.