Only 13 Percent of Americans Are Scared Robots Will Take Their Jobs, Gallup Poll Shows (cnbc.com)

According to the results of a Gallup poll released mid-August, most employed U.S. adults aren't too worried about technology eliminating their jobs. Only 13 percent of Americans are fearful that tech will eradicate their work opportunities in the near future, according to the poll. Workers are relatively more concerned about immediate issues like wages and benefits. CNBC reports: This corresponds with another recent Gallup survey finding that about one in eight workers, or 13 percent of Americans, also believe it's likely they will lose their jobs due to new technology, automation, robots or AI in the next five years. While the survey reflects a generally confident American workforce, Monster career expert Vicki Salemi tells CNBC Make It that people should not become complacent.

"Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills." In the meantime, Americans can look to what the tech giants are saying. On the contrary, Salemi emphasizes that Americans shouldn't be paranoid and lose sleep every night. Rather, they should think about AI "from a place of power." "If your job does start to get automated, you'll already have a game plan and solid skill set to back you up for your next career move," she says. If you find yourself in the 13 percent of Americans worried about losing their jobs to robots, Salemi says you can "robot-proof" your job through networking. "Always be on top of your game, she says. "If your industry is becoming more digitally focused, get schooled on specific skills. Instead of being lax about your career, always stay ahead of the curve, keep your resume in circulation, ask yourself where the industry is headed and most importantly where you and your skills fit in."

Comments

Ignorance is Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

indeed

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds about right, 87% of yanks dumb as fuck.

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[Anne Thwacks]

84% have already lost their jobs to robots.

(and 3% are Amish).

Re:Ignorance is Bliss

[jellomizer]

Actually chances are their jobs will be obsolete before robots will take over. Also if they are career minded they would get promoted and change the nature of their job by the times Robots can do what what they are currently doing in their jobs.

We have worried about automation killing jobs for the past hundred years. However the nature of the jobs have changed and these jobs that automation has taken over, has boosted productivity meaning companies need to hire more people to do jobs that the robots cannot do.

A manufacturing plant back in 1918 With a team of 100 employees can product 800 widgets a day. After automation it can product 8000 widget a day and they hire 500 employees to help meet demand. Without the automation the company and industry couldn't meet demand or sell at a price to match it. After automation came across there is a higher demand that can be met, thus needing more people to do the work.

The problem we have in the economy is finding jobs for workers. But finding customers for companies. High unemployment and under paid employees do not have the money to be customers. If business improve its process (even with automation) then they can sell more product and hire additional people in the areas that are expensive or difficult to automate. Often this mean a greater peak the company could do then before it.

In other news..

[wbr1]

the headline in 2027 reads, only 13% of Americans have jobs after robots took over.

Re:In other news..

[MangoCats]

Somewhere in the 1990s (really really late in the 1990s) only 13% of Americans surveyed thought the Internet would be anything of interest to them.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

the headline in 2027 reads, only 13% of Americans have jobs after robots took over.

And those will mostly be robot mechanics.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates being part of the 87% who dismissed the internet as largely irrelevant in his original publication of The Road Ahead (November 1995).

Re:In other news..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You mean robot mechanics, as in robots who are mechanics, will be the 13% of Americans with jobs in 2027?

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Androids. Sentient robots that will have attained US citizenship by 2027!

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Androids. Sentient robots that will have attained US citizenship by 2027!

I married a fembot, just so she can get her green SD card.

Re: In other news..

[easyTree]

And yet this continual trend of reading the future.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is America, 80% just think God won't allow it so theres nothing to fear.

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well There were two movies, matrix and terminator, so the Americans may turn anything from batteries to underground rebels.

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Got a quote?

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

DARA- Deferred Action for Robot Arrivals

It's not the robot's fault it was built.

Re:In other news..

[slashdot_commentator]

The book was completed before 1995. In May that year, Billy Gates got internet religion, and pretty much made Microsoft pivot hard to the Internet. That's why he offered Internet Explorer for free; to kill Netscape.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere in the 1990s (really really late in the 1990s) only 13% of Americans surveyed thought the Internet would be anything of interest to them.

The internet? Pfff... Its a fad! I give it 2 years... TOPS!

Nobody needs more than 640 kb of data of the internet, during their lifetime!

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

If society turned towards self-reliance, this kind of horror scenario would not be possible. You'll always have the job of taking care of yourself and your family. Expanding from that, jobless people can create a parallel economy where their own work + raw materials is all they need. Maybe a group of people can't create computer chips, but they can cultivate land, build houses, make clothes, educate children, diagnose diseases, and in general cover most necessities. A self reliant community could have its own solar panels, water filtration and perhaps, even automation. So the government could get off much of the responsibility if people had the means of production at their disposal (because work power is plentiful).

Re: In other news..

[Monster_user]

Hate that was posted as an AC. Tough to have a proper discussion with an AC. Self-reliance in small groups defers manpower and brainpower to necessities. Ie. No solar panels. Self-reliance as a nation results in increasing efficiencies to free up resources, manpower and brainpower, to do innovative work, such as creating computers and solar panels and medicine and such. So self-reliance as a nation, or very large group, causes this scenario. Capitalism is the other half of the equation, the "job loss due to unprofitability" part. In capitalism nearly everything, if not everything, is profit driven. We've also got this "minimum wage" thing which pushes capitalism to improve life rather than reduce it to a disposable commodity.

Re: In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=327054

Re:In other news..

[boneglorious]

Oh come on, surely you trust the American population to know where automation is headed! :D

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

In the christian nation of America 12% of people believe Joan of ark was Noah's wife.

Re: In other news..

[losfromla]

I'd rather be a battery. The dream there is much more pleasant. Better than the current simulation we're living in.

Re:In other news..

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Exactly. My first thought upon reading this was that 74% of the workforce is deluding themselves.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

87% welcome their new robotic overlords

Re:In other news..

[david_thornley]

In the early 90s, I said that this web thing would probably not catch on.

Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

I already basically have enough saved up to live on reasonably well for the rest of my life, so if my job is automated away I'll either just leisurely find a new job as long as it has health insurance, or call it quits and trust that the Republicans won't fuck up Obamacare too badly. I feel badly for all the kids who are just entering the workforce in this environment, though. They're going to have a tough go of it.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[DogDude]

As long as your savings are invested, you shouldn't have to worry about inflation. Your investments should keep up with inflation.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[tysonedwards]

Go to the bank and withdraw as much of that now worthless paper as possible... Because even when you canâ(TM)t buy anything with it, paper still has marginal nutritional value... And with as much drug residue is on circulated currency, youâ(TM)d cease to care after a couple thousand dollars of paper lettuce.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Narcocide]

Paper does have a marginal nutritional value, as well as being high in fiber!

US currency however is printed on a type of linen cloth and the ink is highly toxic.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[ShanghaiBill]

What will you do when universal basic income causes hyperinflation

Do you mean the way that trillions in QE caused the 0% hyperinflation we have today?

Gains in productivity cause deflation. For price stability, we need monetary expansion to offset that.

Re:Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

trust that the Republicans won't fuck up Obamacare too badly

They don't need to do anything for that. Plans will continue to get worse, and insurance companies will drop out.

The ACA is a literal disaster. It wasn't healthcare reform, and it wasn't even insurance reform. Without the latter, you're going to be fucked.

So bend over, because you're going to get fucked: it will never be fixed. Because feels.

Re:Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're relying in any way on Obamacare for your retirement, then you haven't saved enough.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. Such a good citizen. Continue.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

"Price stability". LOL! Talk about epic failures, then. Unless of course, the real goal is not actually not the same as the stated goal.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

Bwhahahahahahahaha!

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

You.. are a fucking moron. Inflation is theft plain and simple. You must have been educated in a school influenced by Woodrow Wilsons ideas when he was president of Princeton...

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

0% inflation? Only if you're drinking the coolaid. Real inflation is at least at 10%, using the inflation index originally used, before the government started tinkering with it to manufacture low inflation numbers. At the very least QE resulted in a 4.5% reduction in purchasing power, which translates to inflation.
I don't know what prices you think have been stabilized. Food prices are up. Housing prices are up. The price of capital expenditures, things like hardware, is up except for electronics and cheap Chinese knock offs. About the only commodity that isn't more expensive is oil, and that has more to do with the Saudis flooding the market to keep prices down than anything else.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[ranton]

As long as your savings are invested, you shouldn't have to worry about inflation. Your investments should keep up with inflation.

While this is true under normal circumstances, if even 1970's style inflation occurs then investments will not keep up with inflation. And that was not even close to hyperinflation. I think fears of hyperinflation are unwarranted, but if it does happen then investments in mutual funds are not going to be sufficient.

Hyperinflation is mostly a boogeyman, but it does happen. And it is catastrophic. If you look at post-WW1 Germany, post-WW2 Hungary, and Zimbabwe a decade ago, prices can double every day. A million dollars of retirement funds in 1946 Hungary would have turned into the equivalent of a few hundred bucks in a month.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

Gains in productivity cause deflation. For price stability, we need monetary expansion to offset that.

You're using monetary expansion to keep the prices of products that are getting cheaper to manufacture "stable"?
Is there a special product in particular whose price you're trying to keep stable? Are we using federal monetary policy to keep the price of chia seeds stable?

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[HiThere]

There *are* no safe investments. Different failure modes wipe out different strategies, and some cause previously failing modes to succeed.

One thing you need to remember is that money is governmental accounting for your worth. And all governments cheat some group. (People disagree about exactly what "cheat" means, but for every definition I'm aware of, the prior statement remains true.) Bitcoin, etc., are parasitic on a working government...without a government you won't have an enabling internet. But survivalism is a bet that things are going to fall apart, and fails if they don't.

If the government allowed the creation of additional money at the exact same rate as the production of wealth happened, then there would be no inflation...but nobody even knows how to measure "wealth". It sure isn't money. And this doesn't even address the distribution problem. When robots increasingly do the work, justify a method of distribution. (I'm not talking about when they do all the work. I'm assuming that there will still be some necessary jobs that aren't automated.)

Now to add to the complexity of the problem, most wealth is intangible, and generated by societies rather than individuals. Knowledge of how to produce a hardened steel screw from raw materials, etc. The machinery needed for each way of making that screw is also wealth, but the knowledge of how to do that is the valuable, and took centuries to develop...and part of it was the knowledge that a hardened steel screw was valuable. Without knowing that you don't even aim to produce one. What any one person can add is a very thin layer on top of an immense existing structure. There is a reason that three people in different countries tried to patent the phone at the same time. "Winner takes all." is a hideous travesty. A patent should say something like "The government won't buy or pay for this device if made by someone else.". And it should require the production of a working model. And the patent should be specific. These idiotic generic patents are even an abuse of existing law.

Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[Anonymous Coward]

> US currency however is printed on a type of linen cloth and the ink is highly toxic.

Don't you think we'd see a lot more dead toddlers if that were the case?

Re:Meh, I'm just going to coast on out

[losfromla]

Wow! You must be a hit with the ladies!
Seriously though, it wasn't great because of too many compromises Obama made going in but it was a step in the right direction. Socialized/single payer is the only solution as borne out by the evidence of other countries doing it. Yes, we need healthcare reform, insurance reform (elimination), eating/nutrition reform. We need general lifestyle changes: more sleep, better eating (less carbs, more fat), and better exercising (lift heavy weights). Change those things and everything else could be made to work.

Three possibilities

[WillAffleckUW]

1. People with landlines who answer polls are mostly old retired people who don't have to worry about job loss.

2. Only thirteen percent of Americans live in Fear. They probably watch some TV channel that starts with F.

3. 87 percent of Americans are blissfully unaware that robots are going to take their jobs.

Pick two.

Re:Three possibilities

[DidgetMaster]

The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?

If I make $10, that means that somebody else didn't get it. Maybe I was one of those one-percenters who was privileged and did not earn or deserve it. It can't possibly be that I did something to create that money out of thin air and by also spending it, give other people the chance to build wealth too. Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?

Re:Three possibilities

[WillAffleckUW]

Wow. You really don't get what conservatives are. Conservatives always believe in a fixed pie, and getting a larger slice.

Everyone else just makes more pies. And brownies.

Because sometimes you don't want pie.

It's called capitalism. You may have missed it. Check out Adam Smith's seven books (not just one or two, seven).

Re:Three possibilities

[Dutch Gun]

On a more practical level, I'm convinced that the people terrified of this robot apocalypse don't have a lot of broad experience with many blue-collar jobs (or even white collar jobs outside the tech industry), and don't realize how utterly impractical it would be for robots or AI to take over many of those jobs in the foreseeable future. There are a hell of a lot of jobs besides factory assembly-line work, or drone-like data analysis which advanced algorithms can theoretically do.

In short, the notion that robots will put most people out of work in the next 10 years is pure, unadulterated fantasy. And people have historically been absolutely terrible about predicting the function past a decade out with *any* sort of accuracy. The hubris to believe our generation is the first to do seems sadly typical of the tech crowd.

And I can see these people now, sadly shaking their heads at me, saying "You fool, how can you not see this coming? It's so obvious!" My response would be: let's at least wait until we see the tiniest sign that this is beginning to happen before we all panic and start trying to implement radical (and potentially harmful) solutions for perceived problems that may not even manifest. We can't even begin to realistically imagine what sort of tradeoffs, both positive and negative, will occur from future advanced technology. All we have now is wild speculation and fear-mongering.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so you believe in the infinite pie? Too bad that isn't reality and instead of opportunities to grow wealth, the preferred option is to stifle people's freedom by ownership of the means of production.

People want to blame the decline of Detroit and Flint on the unions, or the regular citizens, but in reality, the automation of labor has had a much larger effect. This also applies to mines, farms, and even the high seas.

And that isn't even counting the base scammery that was the mortgage industry. It stole hundreds of billions from hardworking Americans. We won't get it back.

Bill Gates said it best: What did you think I got rich by writing checks? (Goons trash Homer's House)

Re:Three possibilities

[ErichTheRed]

The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation -- it's a fixed supply of money that just keeps getting shifted around. If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply. In previous generations in the US, this fixed-size pie was more evenly divided for a few reasons;
- High corporate taxes meant that companies avoided them by paying workers more and giving them more generous benefits, because there was a point where it made more sense to distribute the next dollar as an expense rather than declare it as profit.
- Workers had more rights and a greater voice in their salaries and working conditions. Now it's a race to the bottom, which is going to go into warp speed as people claw and kill each other for the last available jobs at any wage.
- There were fewer ways for high net worth individuals and companies to hide their income. Now, there are way more tax loopholes and offshore tax havens to park profits and keep them from being taxed or used domestically.
- In general, wealth is being hoarded. Rich people buy the occasional yacht or mansion, but these purchases don't add up to the same effect as employing a bunch of people in a business.
- Globalization means that businesses can just pick the cheapest country this year and offshore all their operations for a fraction of what they would pay workers in their home country, further accelerating the race to the bottom.

Short of increasing or decreasing the money supply by manipulating interest rates or buying/selling debt, how do you create wealth? It's definitely a fixed pie.

Re: Three possibilities

[ShanghaiBill]

the preferred option is to stifle people's freedom by ownership of the means of production.

Apple is the world's most valuable company. Their "means of production" is a laptop and an open source compiler. You need to take your nose out of Das Kapital and look at the modern world, where wealth comes from innovation not subsidy sucking steel mills.

Re:Three possibilities

[ShanghaiBill]

The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation

If that were true, we would all still be in the stone age.

If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply.

Nonsense. This would only be true if things were worth the same to everyone. If someone pays $5 for my app, I am $5 richer since that app had a marginal value of $0 to me (I can make as many copies as I want). The buyer is also richer, since that app is worth more than $5 to him, or he wouldn't have bought it.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Wealth can be created through babies/children, colonization, and increasing efficiency.

The Earth itself is a fixed pie, but there are ways to optimize or maximize the amount of wealth we can gather from the Earth.

The question isn't on how to accrue wealth, but how to redistribute it. Capitalism favors a top heavy distribution, and questionable allocation of funds due to profit being the primary motivator. This means that for most workers' wealth appears to be very limited, and very fixed. This is likely a sign of poor use of money. Personal gain shouldn't be a driving factor per se.

When it works, capitalism is a way for citizens to vote for the use of funds. When capitalism breaks, it is way to undermine the financial futures of everybody else.

Re:Three possibilities

[Ol Olsoc]

The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?

But let's just imagine your world, where everyone is aggressivly pursuing wealth. Will everyone be wealthy? The aggressive accumulation of wealth means that you want to have more wealth than others. If everyone is wealthy, everyone is also poor.

Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?

Wealth is an equation. There needs to be production and consumption. The rich and the poor will naturally settle into their respective camps. But when one group has dominion over the other, unbalance results. And no, trickle down doesn't work. I amassed a bit of lucre by investments and staying out of debt. And now, whenever I get more, I do the same with it. The only way it could be said that my wealth creates jobs is by stuff I buy. Which except for an extra vacation or two, is the same as when I didn't have much money. The idea that I am a job creator is pretty funny.

Your idea equates to the cocept that if one person has all of the money, they will rain down prosperity uopn all of the rest of us, who by the same token have nothing.

And by the way, many of those who have a lot of money will come after other people's money, so the 1 percent will eat each other eventually. Remember, greed is good.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Such changes can happen suddenly.

It is impossible until it isn't. Then it becomes possible very quickly.

The types of learning AI we're seeing being deployed now would at the very minimum reduce the number of blue collar workers it would take to do the same job. "Manage by exception rather than the rule." As a result, many jobs could potentially be outsourced or offloaded to AI vendors, requiring a handful of people to oversee the machines.

Just because you can't envision blue collar jobs being done by machines, doesn't mean somebody else can't figure out how to automate a portion when a new piece of technology becomes available to solve or reduce the cost of another critical part. 80% to 90% of your job can be automated.

Our economy has been moving towards more efficient and lower cost production, with the intent of removing costly First World workers from the equation.

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

My friend is a truck driver. Driving a truck is only part of his responsibilities. They're going to have to automate a lot more than steering.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

Logged in finally... Doesn't have to be fully automated, it just has to flag somebody who isn't driving or riding in the truck, and provide them enough information to handle the situation. Make it so one former driver can manage more than one truck without a body inside it. It isn't about removing the human element entirely, just reducing the number of humans required to do the job, by eliminating the parts of the job a well trained monkey can do.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

, where wealth comes from innovation not subsidy sucking steel mills.

And did those feet, in ancient times...

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Your lack of understanding of the principles youre attempting to describe is pretty funny. Thanks for that

Re: Three possibilities

[Ol Olsoc]

Your lack of understanding of the principles youre attempting to describe is pretty funny. Thanks for that

And with a one sentence statement, you completely demolish my argument. Thank you for the last laugh of the evening, ya coward.

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?

If I make $10, that means that somebody else didn't get it. Maybe I was one of those one-percenters who was privileged and did not earn or deserve it. It can't possibly be that I did something to create that money out of thin air and by also spending it, give other people the chance to build wealth too. Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?

You gotta love the standard straw man arguments. Money can be interpreted as potential, be it energy, work, or goods. The long term trend is for those at the top to make more and more, but it has to come from somewhere. Suppose originally you had 100 people each earning X dollars a day. That X dollars earns the equivalent work be it a good or service from one of those other 100 people. All works well.

Now suppose instead all the goods and services are handled by 2 people out of those 100 that through automation can undercut the other 98 out of business. The other 98 buy the cheap goods, use up all their money and at best are reduced to barter since those 2 are already self sufficient. They don't have to buy anything from the other 98.

Basically the labor force shrinks, stuff gets cheaper, but it is still cheaper to use a robot so most people are unemployed. Is that likely soon? Probably not. Eventually, there is a chance.

Basically for trickle down to work, the urine stream has to flow over those that need jobs. With automation, that may no longer happen, though I think it is not really a near term issue just yet. In short, money is useless sitting in a drawer. Worst case you may need to hand it back out to keep the economy moving, though again, that is unlikely to be soon.

Re:Three possibilities

[Maxo-Texas]

Horses had about 5-6 years warning.

And their population dropped precipitously once they had no jobs pulling things. Can't keep feed a horse that isn't producing income. Many were knackered while still young.

It was tractors as much as it was automobiles.

What people don't get is that we are not the buggy whip makers, we are the horses.

Re:Three possibilities

[rtb61]

It only really work when there is free land to steal and new resources to claim. Right now mass economic cannibalism is going on the rich parasitically feeding off the poor, basically bringing the system to failure, getting closer and closer. So the majority believe all sorts of silly stuff, still investing in underwater front (should be some real bargains in Houston shortly), the US has a democracy, they won't lose their jobs to robots, that US main stream media news is worth paying attention to, the rest of the world is a threat to the US rather than the other way around, identity politics has value and that psychopathic capitalism (US version) is the same as regulated capitalism.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Short routes, or routes where the driver makes multiple stops for loading/unloading, would be difficult to automate. Longer routes, where there's a single destination, would be more impacted by automation.

Re:Three possibilities

[Dutch Gun]

Where exactly did you get those numbers and facts you're presenting? They don't seem to jibe with historical data I've found for US agriculture. In fact, they seem to be off by a full order of magnitude, as the transition appears to be fairly linear over 50 years, from 1910 to 1960.

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o...
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

Re:Three possibilities

[Anne Thwacks]

You really don't get what conservatives are. Conservatives always believe in a fixed pie, and getting a larger slice.

Then there is a massive difference between the UK and the USA. Here in the UK, it is the conservatives (right) that think the pie (capital) grows as a result of investing capital - which explains why the rich get richer, and Labour (the left) who think if some else has more than they do (mostly nothing) then its because that other person took their share, and the rich get richer because the poor get poorer.

Of course, the difference of opinion is partly explained by using different definitions of poor, and partly by lack of understanding that value is created by jealousy - a thing is only valuable if the people who don't have it, want it. The rich want people to be jealous of them and their belongings, because it makes them richer, and the (left wing) poor want people to be jealous of the rich, cos then more people will support their world view.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anne Thwacks]

Capitalism favors a top heavy distribution

A major component of "capitalism" (how would you define capitalism?) is that people can use the wealth (capital) they have, to generate more capital. This is called positive feedback which inherently leads to exponential runaway unless restrained by something (called regulation).

A system with positive feedback will grow and grown until it explodes (think amplifier howl). In social terms the result is the French (or Russian) Revolution, or ISIS.

In Europe, we have socialists and social security providing restraint so we get there slower.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is the world's most valuable company.

Valued, or valuable?

Their "means of production" is a laptop and an open source compiler.

And you have never heard of copyright, patent, or trademark then? Or iTunes cards. When even criminals find a way to use such a system for their gain, you should know how it works.

You need to take your nose out of Das Kapital and look at the modern world, where wealth comes from innovation not subsidy sucking steel mills.

Ah, somebody thinks that physical goods are not valued, and that the workers in China aren't being exploited by Apple and others for a far greater enrichment than you realize.

Sad. Very sad.

That the workers with their laptops and compilers (open source or otherwise) are also being exploited is another facet of how the pie is not infinite, let alone being shared to all the masses.

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

In the U.S. Conservatives think the same thing. The pie grows, not just because of investment capital. Money is just a way of keeping score. Wealth is nothing but labor. I plant a seed and the seed grows. The wheat is more valuable than the seed. I take a tree and through labor turn it into a chair. The chair is more valuable than the tree. If I own the tree I pay you to make a chair and sell the chair to someone else. I've created value, in collaboration with you. You got some of the value and so did I. IN all cases the chair is more valuable than the tree. No jealousy there, unless your jealous of the fact that the person I sold the chair to because you don't have one. The fact that you're jealous doesn't change the value of the tree or the chair.
In no case is the pie containing the tree and the one containing the chair the same size. The chair pie is bigger. See how silly it is to think that wealth is a fixed size pie.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

The Earth is a fixed size pie which we cannot expand beyond. Thus wealth is a fixed size pie. This doesn't mean we are close to reaching the limits of that wealth. Just the limits of unmanaged "wealth".

Re:Three possibilities

[nasch]

Robots will (and do) create wealth all right. And the wealthy are getting better and better at making sure increases in wealth go to them and only them.

Re:Three possibilities

[jbengt]

It seems you meant to say Envy rather than Jealousy.
Either way, an interesting take on the economic meme that things are simply worth whatever people are willing to pay for them (or sell them for).

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother trying to explain anything involving numbers or economics to liberals. Their peanut brains get stuck on how much YOU have ($5 more than you should for each sale, right?) rather than examining anything else. Obviously after you have made a bunch of money off your app it is time to take it from you and redistribute it because you have harmed society by making such a successful app.

Everyone needs to be equal and there is no room for people that invent things that make everyone better off for personal gain (i.e. robots).

Liberals care about relative wealth and status rather than absolute wealth and status.

In absolute terms, the poor have never been better off and live better lives than the royalty of just 150 years ago but in RELATIVE terms they live the crappiest lives ever. Liberals would rather reduce the absolute wealth of people in exchange for a more equal relative wealth. They would rather the middle class shit in the street as long as the wealthy don't have airplanes and yachts.

No one intelligent should be scared of robots because robots should increase economic output for a given amount of human labor. No matter how you look at it that is great. Even if all that wealth accumulates to the currently wealthy, they have to *do* something with the "wealth" - i.e. trade it for goods and services of others (job creation) or investing in new business (job creation). There is NEVER a situation where labor productivity increases are considered a bad thing for society. Individuals can get fucked if they are so low skilled that they can't do anything but what a robot can but my guess is most people are more capable than that - if they want to be.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

Ah, you're thinking smaller deliveries, like to convience stores or restaurants and such. Those can be automated. Such automation isn't restricted by multiple stops, it is restricted by commodotization of infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is commodotized, it becomes affordable/cheaper than a human, and a part of running the business for all parties involved.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

Maybe that is a better way to describe it. "Positive feedback", or a "feedback loop". The thing is that positive feedback isn't in the effort, but the idea. So the money goes to whoever owns or controls that idea. Sometimes its the guy who had the idea, but usually it is the guys who control the company. Be that shareholders or the executive staff. So the positive feedback isn't being distributed evenly. And wealth isn't being distributed in a manner beneficial to a jobless, or low wage economy.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Short routes like automatic pizza delivery car? They are already testing that.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been happening since 1975. At least in the USA and Finland. The total amount of hours worked has been the same for this whole time. But population has increased.

Re: Three possibilities

[boneglorious]

and drones

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/1...

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

We create money every day. We print it, we sell goverment bonds, and we allow fractional reserve lending. There is no fixed supply of money, and you have a very simplistic view of a complex system.

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Short routes, or routes where the driver makes multiple stops for loading/unloading, would be difficult to automate. Longer routes, where there's a single destination, would be more impacted by automation.

They'll both be replaced by automated custom local manufacturing.

Slashdotters love to make fun of 3D printing, but I really think within 20 years, anything it's possible to make by hand will be produced with 3D printers & CNC bots.

Re:Three possibilities

[HiThere]

Money is not wealth. Money is something that can usually be exchanged for wealth, but the rate of conversion varies from time to time, situation to situation, and person to person.

Wealth is, basically, "degree of wellness", but I'm not talking only about health. And this means that for some problems money doesn't even help you achieve wealth. Sometimes wealth is "my good friends". How much money do you think would be a fair trade for ending up castaway on an island with nobody else on it and nobody looking for you?

OK, that's an extreme case, but not the only one. The problem is that it's easy to measure money, and hard to measure wealth, so people tend to focus on money as a useful surrogate. This is reasonable, but it's important to remember that they aren't the same.

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

"2. Only thirteen percent of Americans live in Fear. They probably watch some TV channel that starts with F."

Right, because it's those people that were seen crying on election night?

Re:Three possibilities

[HeckRuler]

Who the hell voted this up? No, wealth is not a fixed supply. WEALTH is most certainly created. And in the very next breath he switches to saying that MONEY is a fixed supply. First off, ha, no, there isn't a fixed supply of money. No, they print money and pour it in now and then. That a metaphorical printing (and literal, but that's chump-change), it's mostly a digital record these days. The FED genesis's money and loans it to banks. That money came FROM NOWHERE. The Fed has that power and authority. But they don't do that lightly, they don't want runaway inflation anymore than anyone else. There's not a completely fixed supply of money, but it really is more stable than the supply of WEALTH.

Anyway, monetary policy aside, wealth is of course created or destroyed. Not the money representing wealth, but the actual real physical STUFF that money represents. Gold, land, bags of flour, rights to a song, futures on quail eggs, your house, your car, whatever.

You have car. That's worth something. A form of wealth. It's worth $10K or whatever. Now you crash that car. It's now scrap. What is that car's WORTH? $100? WHERE DID THE VALUE GO? It went away. It was destroyed. It WAS useful, now it's not. Likewise, if you have a factory that takes $100 of scrap metal, and $100 of labor, tools, and electricity, and can turn that scrap back into a $10,000 car, then that's wealth that was CREATED. Money is just a placeholder that let's people exchange stuff. It has value in the sense other people want it. The amount of money pales in comparison to the amount of WEALTH in the world.

the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply.

HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXACTLY WRONG! Don't conflate money with wealth. I know they look very similar, but come on, this is like economics 101.

Rich people aren't just hoarding money. Imagine that some dude CREATED a bunch of wealth. Turned a bunch of $100 scrap into $10K cars. People who wanted cars would give him MONEY in exchange for that WEALTH. And he would then have more money than others (who would have cars instead). That's the zero-sum MONEY game. The rich got their money by (owning the means of) creating wealth. ...or by inheritance. The entire idea behind the concept of money is that other people would likewise CREATE WEALTH they would then sell to others in exchange for this placeholder thing called money. And that goes for the poor too. They could do whatever to create wealth and take money from rich dicks. (but typically that means working a job which ALSO makes the rich owner money. Who reaps the gains of labor is a social issue. One the poor are losing per the GINI coefficient.)

Re:Three possibilities

[genfail]

Maybe you should read all seven of his books since Adam Smith was anti-capitalist.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

My guess is more like 74%. The people paying the invoice for the robot to be delivered will be the remaining 13% employed.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Uh, if you make $10 in a DAY, then compared to the rest of the world outside of the United States you are a 1%er

Re: Three possibilities

[losfromla]

Right now it's still cheaper and faster to remove material than build it up. Faster even to make a mold and then make pieces at rates of thousands per hour or day. No way that 3D printing is going to catch up with that, ever. Definitely good for custom parts though, like a replacement handle for your 1980's boombox.

Re: Three possibilities

[losfromla]

Yes, CNC bots, great for medium sized runs and fast runs of robust parts.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What is replaceable with tech I'm aware of in the next 2 years: Fast food jobs, retail jobs, drop-ship jobs, call center jobs, delivery jobs, construction jobs, factory manufacturing jobs.

Re:Three possibilities

[losfromla]

They don't "have" to do something with the wealth. Mostly they hoard. They also create jobs in the cheapest locations, with the least environmental regulations, human protections, etc. In short, they externalize their costs to maximize their profits and sell at the highest possible prices. IOW, they extract wealth from wherever possible, enslave workers in poor countries and depress wages in their target markets.

I find it hilarious that the "conservatives" on this forum are all AC. Probably because they are russian bots.

Re:Three possibilities

[coldsalmon]

This is fundamentally incorrect on many levels. First of all, the money supply affects inflation; it does not create wealth. If that were true, you could create wealth by printing money. Wealth of the kind you are talking about relates to the capital stock, which does increase over time as raw resources are converted into durable capital goods. Anyhow, it's monumentally obvious that wealth/capital can increase and decrease over time, and is not a fixed pie. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that GDP, stock market value, and the quantity of housing stock have all increased over time? Economics is a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Wasn't that experiment the basis for the TV show Survivor? And the answer was- a million dollars was worth causing all your friends to leave and hate you.

Re:Three possibilities

[losfromla]

No, they were happy. Now they're a little perturbed that their ACA (that's the same as Obamacare?! Oh, snap!) is being destroyed by the bigly oopma loompa.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

By the law of entropy, then, the total wealth of the universe is constantly shrinking.

Re:Three possibilities

[SoftwareArtist]

Wealth doesn't mean money. Wealth means things of inherent value. Money is just a bookkeeping tool for keeping track of wealth. If you create a valuable good, you've created wealth. If you increase the money supply, you just cause inflation so the (arbitrary) monetary value we attach to that good changes, but you don't create wealth.

Re:Three possibilities

[MorePower]

That is flat out nonsense. The United States alone has over 4% of the world's population. So even if everyone else in the world is poorer than everyone in the United States (everyone in Europe? Australia? Japan? And let's not forget Saudi princes, the Kim family in North Korea, and all the other 3rd world rich elites) you would still need to be in the top 25% of the USA to be a global 1%. I'm pretty sure the top quartile of the USA makes a lot more than $10 per day

Re: Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

No way that 3D printing is going to catch up with that, ever.

Famous last words. You are not seeing the potential of the approach because you're focusing on what current techniques can do today. Consider today's 3D printing as "proof of concept," if nothing more.

Does it matter if you can only print 1 mold per day, when you have 30,000 molds being printed nationwide on that day?

Manufacturing is very centralized because of economies of scale. Small-batch on-demand distributed manufacturing will eliminate that waste and shipping demand.

The point is that any of the techniques you see in use today are ripe for automation tomorrow.

Re:Three possibilities

[HeckRuler]

OH NOES! ENTROPY! If only we had some sort of massive exterior energy source that constantly bathed half the planet with excess energy. Maybe it'd be responsible for the entire biosphere and all life as we know it.

This is the most laughable bullshit attempt at spin that I've ever seen. It's right up there with those crazy-pants young-earthers that try to use entropy as an explanation for why evolution is impossible. But trying to use to the say that FINANCIAL WEALTH can't be created? That's even worse.

Heat is not wealth. If you think it is, then go die in a pile of wealth.

Re:Three possibilities

[HiThere]

Don't know. I don't watch TV. If so I'm sure they jiggered the situation for dramatic tension.

Re:Three possibilities

[Maxo-Texas]

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Note from effectively ground zero in 1905, horses dropped steeply after peaking in 1915. Cars had replaced 2/3 of them in 10 years, and virtually all of them by 1930. Robots could replace most human workers over a 10 year period, and virtually all in 15 years. Change can happen very quickly.

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/ec...
I agree with your point on tractors. While the decline was relentless, horses held on longer on farms to about 1960 as you indicated. I had read text to the effect that the tractor was responsible for more horse replacements but not the time frame (45 instead of 15 years). Most horses today are pets.

http://www.imh.org/exhibits/on...

Re:Three possibilities

[SnarkSide]

Possibility four: Jobs are not under serious threat, despite the media focus on automation, robots and AI.

Re: Three possibilities

[david_thornley]

I think that's a too limited definition of wealth. My car and my phone are far better than I could have gotten for the same (inflation-adjusted) price ten years ago. I have a Nook ereader with lots of books on it. It just gets more valuable as I acquire more books without taking more resources.

Things can get better without getting bigger.

Re: Three possibilities

[david_thornley]

The question isn't whether centralized manufacturing is cheaper and faster; it's whether it's cheaper and faster enough. We do lots of things in less efficient ways because it's not that much more expensive, compared to our income.

Re: Three possibilities

[david_thornley]

Economies don't explode without regulation. There is always friction and negative feedback, and eventually those overcome the positive feedback. Unregulated economies might crash more, and are overall less efficient than properly regulated ones. Realistically, if I come up with a widget I can make inexpensively and that people want, the market will eventually become saturated. I could be incredibly wealthy by then, of course, but not infinitely so.

ISIS is somewhere between a religious and nationalistic movement. It isn't a result of rampant capitalism (although it's partly fueled by colonialism). The French Revolution was against the aristocracy and king, not capitalism. The Russian Revolution of October was a revolution against capitalism, but not a result of capitalism overload because Russia was not there yet. More advanced economies with more capitalism didn't revolt.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The rest can be done with RFID tags, scanners, and a good database.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

Hence my statement about "unmanaged" wealth increases. Things tend to get bigger when they are unmanaged, and just taking the path of least resistance. By "managed" wealth increases, I mean taking efforts to optimize wealth increases under various pressures. Optimizations, and increases in efficiency being choice among them. City planning, or otherwise making it possible to expand upwards rather than outwards is another. But yeah, if we can manage what we have, and scale it down, we can make room for more stuff. Like merging computers and televisions with telephones.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You just defined weath as USEFULNESS. Entropy isn't just about heat, it's about USEFUL ENERGY vs WASTE ENERGY. Matter is just an amazingly useful form of energy. And notice, I said UNIVERSE, not planet- local eddies happen.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

But that 4% uses over 40% of the world's resources, therefore each American is worth 40 of anybody else.

Re: Three possibilities

[Monster_user]

The question is whether it WILL be cheaper and faster enough, within a reasonable time frame which would likely affect the current labor force, say within about 10 years from now. Is it possible to create optimizations in centralized manufacturing which make enough of a difference to make an impact? Will those optimizations outpace optimizations in other areas of manufacturing and/or distribution?

Re:Three possibilities

[HeckRuler]

The entire sum of human existence is in a "local eddy" and the rule that governs the whole (but quite explicitly have exceptions for the local specific) aren't really all that insightful.

Re:Three possibilities

[MooseMiester]

Good Grief. OK so for the record I do have a degree in Economics.

You pay someone $10. They deposit that money in a bank. The bank loans the $10 to someone else. Your $10 is now $20. The person who takes out the loan pays someone for equipment they want. That person puts the money in their money market savings account. The bank invests that money in Apple stock. And so it goes. How fast this happens is called the velocity of money.

The government spends more than they earn, prints money. That's another lesson, called stupid shit politicians do.

Re:Three possibilities

[MooseMiester]

So you have no savings and no desire to save. When you shop for things you pay no attention to price. Given the choice between two products, you pick the one with the highest price, even 100% more, based on the builder's values. You work at the lowest wage your employer will pay.

If all of this is true, good for you, but I have bad news you're in a teenie tiny minority. Or very young and extremely naive. Or brainwashed. Or both.

Re:Three possibilities

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yes it is, but I'm not the one who defined wealth by usefulness.

Or for that matter, am trying to make the astounding claim that wealth is infinite.

Re:Three possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

What a silly, simplistic comment. Progressives don't think the pie is fixed, but they do believe it's rigged. The pie keeps getting bigger and bigger but so many people's slices somehow get smaller and smaller. That's because the extra pie is all going to the people who already have enough pie. And that happens because our system of crony capitalism, with assists from for-profit health care and soft forced materialism (good luck finding a modern job that doesn't effectively require you to have a smartphone, etc.), pushes newly created wealth upward.

Re:Three possibilities

[losfromla]

You are so funny. The difference between me and corporations is that they control governments/regulations/laws and have the power to do extensive harm to people directly and the environment by their greedy decision making. Way to find false equivalencies though. It didn't work for *president drumpf and it doesn't work for you.

Then you tried for the backhand insult. *sigh*

Re: Three possibilities

[losfromla]

Like I said. For very special custom stuff, yes additive manufacturing. For mass production, it won't become mainstream probably ever.

Re:Three possibilities

[MooseMiester]

We have a saying in the big "D": What's the difference between the mafia, the UAW, the Auto Companies, and the Government?

The answer is that there is no difference.

But the real difference is that with business, you know what they want and how they behave. They exist to serve their stockholders. The Union wants to preserve it's existence. The Mafia and the Government, on the other hand, serve no purpose except to control you, rob from you, and force you to pay them, The problem you liberals have is you have this fantasy belief that somehow a large group of humans working in a group labeled as "government" are somehow entirely different from a large group of humans labeled as "corporation". The ultimate goal of modern leftism is to convert the system of kleptocracy into one of one gigantic government, while at the same time railing against monopolies - with this foolish, naive belief that there are these benevolent people who have all our best interest at heart. There are no such people. And the people who tell you that is who they are - they are liars.

It's not an insult to tell someone they are young and foolish when it's coming from a person who was once young and foolish. Your post was foolish. I'm sorry, but that's my opinion, sir. Because you want to classify groups of humans as being somehow completely different from each other, which is, by the way, the very definition of racism. But I understand you've been brainwashed to believe that corporations are evil and government is somehow benevolent, when, in fact, government is the most evil corporation of all.

Re:Three possibilities

[losfromla]

MooseMolester, I have no idea what the big "D" is, I probably couldn't give two shits about it either.

The real answer is that our psychopathic corporations which you clearly worship are a creation of the government which you so loathe. Corporations in Germany for example, have a heart and soul built into them, by constitutional law they have to have an advisory board made up of 50% rank and file employees. Amusingly ours and the Russian's generals gave them that constitution after WWII, that law accounts for a tremendous amount of why they are an industrial power. So, there's one more thing you can blame on the government, they gave us evil corporations.

No offense but to me you now sound old and foolish and brainwashed by Faux news. You probably think *president drumpf is doing a fantastic job and is being unfairly persecuted by the evil media. There is no fool like an old fool.

Re:Three possibilities

[MooseMiester]

The big "D" is the city run by Democrats for 40 years. They haven't done a very good job. Have you been to Germany? Have you seen how the Merkel government is destroying the country? Have you worked directly with German Corporations? I find them to be little different than corporations here. I think you've read into the fantasy about how great Europe is compared to the USA. Funny thing, they all think we are pretty darn special too. It's the "grass is always greener" syndrome. I'd prefer to live in a country where I'm not taxed 50%.

The first problem I see is that you've been brainwashed into the "We are the good guys, the other guys are the bad guys". Truth is both sides have good ideas and bad ideas. The second problem, that you're clearly wed to, as was I when I was young, is that "the establishment" which is now rebranded as "evil corporations" are the enemy, who's wealth is undeserved and should be confiscated by the good guys and given to the needy. This is rebranded communism, it's only killed around 100 million people in the last hundred years, and yet it continues to dupe people into the feel good part of it. Take a trip over to Eastern Europe, or Russia, and talk to people who actually lived under this system. And please spare me the liberal "Oh they just didn't do it right" nonsense.

But I digress. Yes, I'm clearly older than you, because I am a realist and you are a dreamer. I now realize that I was young and foolish once, whereas you clearly think you have all the answers. No worries, you'll figure it out. For the record I don't support either party, I used to be a die hard Democrat, just like you, but I woke up and realized that they were the evil party and the GOP was the stupid party. I vote for the best candidate and ignore the letter next to the name. Trump has done some stupid shit, and he's done some really good things. Hillary would have done what the Clintons always do, which is not in the Countries best interest, it's in theirs. Sanders would have been a much better candidate, but he got shafted by the DNC. There's something worth getting mad about.

People have been trading with each other for a very long time, business is what people do, it's no more psychopathic than breathing. Governments have been telling big lies to enrich the pockets of the leaders just as long. Try, just try to engage in some critical thinking, rather than all that emotional hate speech that stirs your heart but rots your brain. It was nice being insulted by you. Now I know you have to have the last word so go for it.

Re:Three possibilities

[HeckRuler]

Did I? I guess I said "It WAS useful, now it's not." But..... that's it.

And... that's the first time someone mentioned infinity. Was it some grandparent? No? well, I guess that shmuck compared it to "conservation of energy".

oooOOooh. I see where you're going with that. YEAH! Fuck that strawman! We're gonna take him out back and really SHOW HIM WHAT FOR! Woooo! Fuck that guy!

Re: Three possibilities

[david_thornley]

There's limits as to how cheap centralized manufacturing can get (in the ultimate limiting case, approximately zero cost, like software).

Also, having a 3D printer isn't completely trivial. I decided against buying one, since it would have to be a minor hobby and I don't want another one of those right now. (Maybe a year or two from now.) I'd have to find a place for it, and some of the materials used need special ventilation. (Commercially, some materials require nitrogen or argon in the printer. I suspect the argon is for titanium printing.)

As a wargamer, my pewter figures are more detailed than I could get with a printer costing under a thousand, and my CAD design skills aren't particularly good yet. Fat Dragon Games has been running World War Tesla at conventions, with everything on the table printed on an affordable printer, and that's tempting. (It should be generally available later this year or maybe early next year.)

Easily Explained

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because 87% of Americans are virtually robotic in their thinking.

Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly doubt a robot could do finish carpentry. Imagine a robot trying to hang crown molding. And the day they make a robot that can sand hardwood floors, I'll fricken buy one myself. LOL /Losers FTW

captcha: knuckledragger

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[fluffernutter]

I think the problem isn't so much a robot taking a carpentry job. Rather, robots are going to chase hobby carpenters out of their higher paying and more steady office jobs thus causing them to fall back on carpentry, thus giving you ten times more competition and putting the wage through the floor.

Re: Yeah, not too worried

[Ken_g6]

I can imagine robots doing most of crown molding. First, a device laser-measures the walls and ceiling. Then the measurements are sent out to a factory, where robots custom-build the molding parts. Finally I can imagine a robot placing and nailing the parts. But even if a robot doesn't finish the job, a robot in a factory could mean one person does twice as many jobs.

And a Roomba could almost be converted for sanding floors, but it's not quite strong enough or even enough.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm even less worried that displaced desk jockeys will present any kind of lasting competition. Everyone thinks carpentry is so easy. Desk jockeys can't even handle the dust. Oh, my allergies!

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

And this is the reason the article survey came up with that stupid opinion. Current robots can't do your job, so you don't believe future robots will cause you any problem. But they will. Just how they'll do it is uncertain, since there are multiple ways in which it could happen. They might just become better than you at detail work, flexibility, and aesthetic judgment, but that's only one way it could happen, and probably not the fastest. More likely they'll more quickly lead to a redesign of methods of building into ways that are easy for them and hard for you. There will still be a few really rich people who will want the old style enough to pay for it and also be wealthy enough, but the number of jobs will decrease by a huge factor, and most carpenters will end up unemployed. The real robot carpenters may be a decade behind the first wave.

OTOH, predicting the timeline is tricky. It depends on lots of other things. E.g., if the robots need to carry their smarts in their body it will take longer than if they are able to run off some wireless transmission, but the wavebands are already getting jammed, so it will need to be some fairly high bandwidth short range transmission. An optic link might do it, or infra-red or even low power microwave.

People are lousy at predicting the future because the actual future is the result of LOTS of things currently under development, most of which won't go anywhere, but some of which will be more spectacularly successful than anyone expects. Maybe holographic projectors will cause us not to care what anything we can't touch really looks like. Unlikely, but it's "one of the things that are under development". I doubt that VR would be able to get THAT extreme, but it could happen...given the proper changes in social custom.

OTOH, as a rule of thumb, if a prediction is for less than five years, expect it to take longer than they say, because of unexpected problems. And if it's for longer than 15 years expect it to take less time because of unexpected solutions. And note that there's a lot of uncertainty in this. And people's predictions of when something will happen are often biased in ways that confound this rule of thumb, you've also got to consider how reasonable the prediction is, which is hard if you aren't "skilled in the art".

P.S.: You, the carpenter, probably won't immediately be able to justify buying the robot. But the contractor who hires you will be able to justify it a lot sooner. Especially if it's also a plumber.

Re: Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Few months ago I did not know what is happening in the AI development. When I learned it, I realized that even if I would tell it to the people, they would not bulieve it. 2 years. That is how long it will take. Lets continue this talk in 2 years, because then it will be obvious to everyone.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[losfromla]

You undervalue your potential competition at your own peril. They are smart, determined, focused, and tougher than you think. They could have gone into carpentry but chose not to. They may be damn good at it, scary damn good.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[losfromla]

Maybe holographic projectors will cause us not to care what anything we can't touch really looks like. Unlikely, but it's "one of the things that are under development". I doubt that VR would be able to get THAT extreme, but it could happen...given the proper changes in social custom.

Its funny you should postulate that. My kids used to play Club Penguin and they really liked decorating the walls of their "house" with knick-knacks and such. Why not the same thing in 'real life'?

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

Well, the reason holographic projections are unlikely to replace actual things include that they tend to wash out in bright light and that the current projectors are expensive and require a lot of maintenance. So I think them unlikely. But they *might* happen. It would probably require a combination to technical improvements and fashion changes, but those are both possibilities, and it's possible that just the right ones could happen so that....

Which is what I meant about the difficulty in predicting the future. It's easy to look at things and say "The current situation is unstable, and it could go in this direction...", but saying it *will* go in this direction is something more difficult. Saying "It's not going to stay the same" is a safe prediction, but nearly useless. So.

Consider supermarket checkout clerks. Most supermarkets I go to have lots of unused lines, and they used to be full all the time. This is partially because of bar codes speeding up the job of the clerks, and partially because of self-checkout. And perhaps it's partially that you don't get people coming in all at the same time as much, and partially home deliver of items. So even after the fact I don't really know why many of those jobs disappeared, though I can spot contributing factors, some of which one could call automation, though hardly robots. Or think of the way the cashier job at a fast-food joint has been deskilled.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the reason holographic projections are unlikely to replace actual things include that they tend to wash out in bright light and that the current projectors are expensive and require a lot of maintenance.

I can't help but wonder what the heck holographic projectors you're talking about here??

Was there a quantum leap in holography that I'm unaware of?

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[losfromla]

Rather than holographic projectors I was thinking more along the lines of augmented reality glasses. Like if you look through your glasses you see the "bonus" stuff that only exists in the digital world. Like a limited edition copy of an original mural by Diego Rivera, only shows up through the glasses, wherever you've placed it. When friends come over, they share your insanity by logging into your augmentations... Ancient vases, fancy clothing made of rhinoceros hide, etc. All only existing in the digital world. Heck, you could make yourself much more attractive (or scary) even, digitally. Fun!

I agree, the future is hard to predict though. I definitely see the disappearance of many jobs within the next 50 years. Definitely still within my lifetime, I hope.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

No. The existing ones have to be counted as rudimentary as well as washing out on bright light and needing lot of maintenance. They are lab curiosities. But they *may* not stay that way. I was mentioning them as an example of something that probably won't be significant...but which *MIGHT* be if some unexpected things happen (which would need to include *both* technical improvement as fad).

Just remember that at one time the estimate was there might be a market for 6 computers in the whole world. Now granted, that estimate was made awhile ago... (1943.) It took a large number of technical changes to get from then to now, but it also took a bunch of social changes.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

I think VR glasses will be *MUCH* more likely, and therefore not as good an example of what I meant. Also, they'd have a very different use case.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but what existing ones are you talking about? Do you have a link? Because I thought this was in the realm of science fiction.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[losfromla]

You mean something more like the danger room or that fancy room in star trek that can be anything... Yeah, that'll take a while.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

https://www.google.com/search?...

I didn't see any refs there to the Japanese pop-singer who's a computer generated hologram, but it's also real.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, as I thought... these are not holograms, they are images projected or reflected on a screen or plate of glass.

It's really unfortunate how few people understand what a hologram is. It's a recorded interference pattern of light, not just any old image projected into a 3D space.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

IIUC, sometimes the Japanese singer is projected onto a fog, but you're going to need SOME secondary radiator or you won't see the light. The only other way is to shine the light directly at you, and with a laser that's not exactly recommended. And using a secondary radiator doesn't mean that the original projection wasn't a hologram. (Was it? Possibly not technically. But words generally have a loose meaning as well as a tight meaning, and I wasn't talking about the mathematical definition, which nothing existing really quite fits.)

Well, ok, there's another approach, though you might not want to call that a hologram either: What you do is compute what light would be emitted at each point intersecting with a surface and then have a REALLY LARGE computer screen generate that light. You need to have LOTS of (very short) light pipes inside the screen, because each point needs to generate different lights headed in different directions. With this system each watcher needs to be tracked so you can generate the image that they should see. VR glasses are a better way to accomplish this.

Since what I was originally discussing was fake 3-D images of a finely grained ceiling, the fancy ways and precise definitions seem unreasonable. A fake moose head over the fireplace doesn't need to be precisely tuned, especially if the room is so designed that nobody can get within 3 feet of it. A wood paneled ceiling is even easier...and still beyond reasonable availability. (Remember, was I was asserting is that robot installed ceilings would get there first.)

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but even if it's not a hologram in the true technical sense, in the looser sense I meant the idea of projecting a 3D image into 3D space.

What all these supposed "holographic" projectors really do is project a 2D image of a 3D scene or object either onto something (screen, fog/mist stream) or reflect it off of a mirror or glass surface, or use VR/AR to fool the eye into seeing something in 3D space, which really isn't there - it's on your retina.

The whole idea of "projecting" a hologram is flawed because air is transparent to light. You have to have something to diffuse it, whether it's dust or fog or whatever, there's no way to "draw" on empty air. The only thing I've seen that comes close is this plasma emitter display which can actually project an image into 3D space without you having to look through a glass plate. It's pretty rudimentary, though.

Re:Yeah, not too worried

[HiThere]

Well, there *is* another approach that has been used, but I don't know on what scale. What you do it take a crystal (probably some kind of glass) and position certain tiny "fluorescent" "drops" carefully within it. These drops only fluoresce if stimulated appropriately. This is done by hitting them with two appropriately chosen laser frequencies from two different directions. Only where the beams intersect is there a visible light emission. You've got to scan rapidly. The tricky part is building the "crystal ball".
This dates back at least to the 90's. They were talking about using it as a model for a diamond memory. I haven't heard about it since then. (I've heard about the diamond memory, but not the 3-D model.) My guess is that it's still technically too difficult (which partially means other ways are easier).

Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[ErichTheRed]

From the summary: ""Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills."

Learning what? Sharpening their skills for what job? My problem with people saying we should stick with the age-old advice of training for the next better job, is that they don't see that most people won't be able to get a better job. The Industrial Revolution mechanized farm work and sent farmers to factories. Improvements in manufacturing sent factory workers to clerical jobs. Office automation via IT and software killed large-scale clerical work and sent those workers to the service industry. Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere. Automation of intelligence (for example, law school grads being replaced by an algorithm) sends them...nowhere, with lots of debt.

Basically, we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix. For the vast majority of people incapable of handling anything beyond a simple job, this will mean they'll be unemployed and unable to get new work at reasonable pay. And it's not just factory workers and drivers...large corporations routinely pay employees fairly decent salaries to manually execute an unchanging algorithm on a stack of work. We're either going to have to make work for people or realize that not everyone can be employed...and hopefully not resort to drastic measures to fix it.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[waspleg]

If I had mod points they'd be yours.

The goal of all of this shit should be to eliminate as much work as possible for the good of everyone but our economic system will not allow for that.

Our technological evolution has far outpaced our societal evolution and I mean globally not just America.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[rmdingler]

The goal of all of this shit should be to eliminate as much work as possible for the good of everyone but our economic system will not allow for that. Our technological evolution has far outpaced our societal evolution and I mean globally not just America.

See, that'd be just fucking great if the spoils of economic freedom permitted by robotic industry were shared by the people.

It just seems much more likely it will exploit the accrual wealth by an infinitesimal percentage of the population.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Kjella]

Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere.

The service industry is a pretty big place, an automatic taxi driver yes... an automatic nurse, nah. Not without 50 years of robotics and "I, robot" levels of human interaction. I also expect we'll need some kind of domain experts to work with the robots, like hiring an electrician to do the job and he tells the robot how to do the wiring. It's not like anyone has been able to make business users design sensible IT systems, why would the real world be any different? There's only so much computers can do to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot until they have strong AI and start figuring out what the customer really wants.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the next-best-job is "Politician" so that they can pass laws outlawing job automation.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure we're anywhere near the point of robots or AI being able to intuit as well as humans. There are simply many problems that can't be solved by algorithm. Sure there are expert systems with enough data to propose solutions - that doesn't mean the solution is the correct one.

But even more so is the legal aspect of licensing. Many professions require state licensing and I'd bet it's not going to be easy to get state licensing boards and legislatures to overturn those laws to allow robots or AI to perform the same tasks.

I think instead because of these two points is that you're going to see AI increasingly used as an assistant for the human. It's already started in many professions such as medicine. The combination of expert systems with human beings would be powerful. AI by itself would be weaker and subject to many limitations both algorithmic and legal.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Tablizer]

[Prepare for replacement] Learning what? Sharpening their skills for what job?

Learning to write bullshit about robots; it's the latest thing.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[JBMcB]

The Industrial Revolution mechanized farm work and sent farmers to factories.

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no farm jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought factory labor was going to be big.

Improvements in manufacturing sent factory workers to clerical jobs.

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no factory jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought office labor was going to be big.

Office automation via IT and software killed large-scale clerical work and sent those workers to the service industry.

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no service industry jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought the service industry sector was going to be big.

Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere.

And here we are today.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Robotic nurses wouldn't likely be mobile, or one size fits all. Humans would likely be moved down an assembly line of sorts, with learning AI to recognize the human component, and follow pre-programmed but adaptable instructions.

This would lead to a significant reduction in nurses, as they would only be needed to manage the exceptions. And by reduction it is likely only a reduction in demand, as I understand nurses to be in short supply as it is.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had an account I'd most this, and both parents up!

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Gr8Apes]

Automation of the service industry sends these workers...

To YouTube.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Will such continue forever? Or will the workforce literally die off due to a "lack of creativity"?

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Monster_user]

Have we reached the end of the line for the "next job", or just the next "profitable" job? We may have merely reached the end of the age, such as the end of capitalism. Surely there is plenty of work left to be done, it just isn't "profitable" work.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

But even more so is the legal aspect of licensing. Many professions require state licensing and I'd bet it's not going to be easy to get state licensing boards and legislatures to overturn those laws to allow robots or AI to perform the same tasks.

Oh, great! Now we have corporatism, a key ingredient for fascism.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Monster_user]

Two corrections. If I had *mod points, I'd *mod all these up. Not sure if just a newb, or if mod points don't show up in Safari on iOS. (No mod buttons).

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Maxo-Texas]

We can't know that we've come to the end of job creation.

However, we are likely to be at the start of a 10-30 year period where jobs are destroyed faster than they can be created.

OTH, signs from japan are not promising. Instead of wanting humans for jobs as a status thing- they want robots (robots don't pry, don't steal, don't kidnap your kids, leak your secrets to the gossip magazines, etc.).

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[dunkelfalke]

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no farm jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought factory labor was going to be big.

And yet there was a generation of farmers without work who weren't accepted as workers in the factories, dying in debtor' prisons.

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no factory jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought office labor was going to be big.

And yet many workers still had to work in increasingly worse conditions because there was not enough clerical work to do and it also required many skills former workers simply did not have. Socialists didn't just come out of nowhere, you know.

People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no service industry jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought the service industry sector was going to be big.

Also resulting in high rates of permanently unemployed. Literally millions are out of work and are not able to find a job for years.

And here we are today.

Here we are indeed. Only you seem to look at everything through rose-tinted glasses.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The reality is that a lot of people get left behind as a intelligence becomes increasingly important. We had better find a solution unless we want to have an increasingly impoverished underclass.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[cmseagle]

The goal of all of this shit should be to eliminate as much work as possible for the good of everyone but our economic system will not allow for that.

The goal should be to eliminate less productive work so that labor can be allocated to more productive work. What's needed is job training and mid-career education so that the pain of the transition is minimized for those caught up in it. The fact that those structures don't exist is a societal problem, not an economic one (as much as you can draw a distinction between a society and its economy, anyways).

That falls apart if you believe that there's a subset of society that is fundamentally incapable of making the transition because of natural ability, talent, whatever, but I'm more optimistic about the capacity of humans to improve themselves given the opportunity to do so. OP claims by fiat that "we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix" without providing a justification for why that's the case.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Headw1nd]

The problem is not just that we don't have a society-wide system that allows for this, we don't even have a small scale system that works under these principles that we can model society after. Off the top of my head, the only "work-optional" systems I can think of are college undergrads and hereditary aristocracy, neither of which shows much promise as a good model for our social system moving forward.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere.

The service industry is a pretty big place, an automatic taxi driver yes... an automatic nurse, nah. Not without 50 years of robotics and "I, robot" levels of human interaction. I also expect we'll need some kind of domain experts to work with the robots, like hiring an electrician to do the job and he tells the robot how to do the wiring.

For a new pre-fab building maybe but unless you tear down all existing buildings how are robots going to do electrical work on those?

If you think a trade is easy it's probably because you've never done it yourself.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[rkordmaa]

The farmers couldn't imagine working in a factory, the factory workers couldn't imagine working as clerks, clerks couldn't imagine working in today's service industry and we cannot imagine where work will take people tomorrow. Our failure to imagine the future, does not mean there isn't going to be one.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[hord]

This also falls apart when you assume that everyone is capable or desirous of this ultra-efficiency driven goal-oriented framework. Most people want to wake up, eat, do something they feel is productive and fun, eat some more and go to sleep comfortably. The vast majority of people will do absolutely nothing to assist with this if it is just handed to them or if they don't feel in control of it. We need a system that addresses this fundamentally because we have huge productivity and productivity target mismatches.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[nasch]

Transition to what? We're maybe OK for the next 10 or 20 years, maybe even more. If computers start doing the jobs of engineers, doctors, programmers, lawyers, and robot technicians (and have already taken over much of transportation, warehousing, retail stocking, food service, construction, emergency services, military) what is it these millions of people are going to transition to? There's this idea that because every revolution in the past has led to more new jobs created than old jobs destroyed that it will happen that way every time. But if robots become about as capable at most tasks as a human, both physically and mentally, there's no reason to think that will be the case.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[ErichTheRed]

"But even more so is the legal aspect of licensing. Many professions require state licensing and I'd bet it's not going to be easy to get state licensing boards and legislatures to overturn those laws to allow robots or AI to perform the same tasks."

Licensed professions are going to be the last to go, simply because they're paying for favorable laws. We in the technology sector could learn a thing or two about these two counter-examples:
- The health professions are regulated so tightly that there's almost no chance their members will feel any pain. The medical profession tightly controls the supply of medical school slots, assuring that anyone graduating from one is guaranteed to be very wealthy because demand for doctors is always greater than supply. Costs are kept high because their lobbying basically boils down to "Do whatever you want with the insurance system as long as we keep getting paid the same, or we'll unleash our campaign machine." And professional licensing is intentionally difficult to obtain and requires effort to maintain, ensuring minimum quality.
- A counter-example of late is the legal profession. The Bar Association in the US actually encouraged the creation of more law schools, and offshoring of routine legal tasks. The difference in outcomes for law students now compared to 25 years ago is staggering. In the past, law school was a guaranteed ticket to a respected job with a good salary, and graduating from one of the top 14 law schools was an express ticket to elite law firm positions and astronomical salaries. Today, the only hope of making back the investment in education is to be at the top 10% of one of those top 14 law schools, be picked up by one of the white shoe firms, and stick it out until you become a partner. When a profession doesn't support its members, this is what happens.

I think that as long as the licensed professions (health, engineering, etc.) can keep a lid on automation through regulation, members will be able to keep working. If not, they have enough lobbying power to ensure their members can be bought out. An example here would be the longshoreman's unions. When containerization occurred, and manual labor wasn't needed to move cargo on and off ships, their members were paid for the rest of their careers out of the savings that the ports and shipping companies realized. I think something similar will have to happen with automation.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you can't see where the new jobs will go doesn't mean they won't shift somewhere.

Here are some arbitrary options to whet your appetite:
- More arts (performance, music, movies, books, etc.)
- Different services that haven't been automated. Saying "Would you like fries with that, sir" 100x a day is not a real desirable job anyway. Maybe next that person could learn to be a personal assistant,give massages, or provide style consulting.
- Entire new industries. The video game industry didn't exist at all in the not too distant past. "Creation" of the industry is partly due to people who had "nothing better to do". Certainly there will be a lot of people with "nothing better to do".

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[boneglorious]

Agreed, and I don't want to hear the old claim, "But people who don't work won't have any self-respect and won't know how to spend their time in a satisfying manner." The former is a bug we will correct, the latter is just the thing people say about all those other people they don't know.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[boneglorious]

"Most people want to wake up, eat, do something they feel is productive and fun, eat some more and go to sleep comfortably. The vast majority of people will do absolutely nothing to assist with this if it is just handed to them or if they don't feel in control of it." Agree with the first sentence, but not sure about the second sentence. Are you claiming that's what we have now, where we have to have a job and that is the thing we do to feel productive so we don't have the burden of figuring out how to spend our days in a way we feel good about? If so I agree.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anne Thwacks]

re you the buggy-whip manufacturer? That is not how mechanisation works. Replacing nurses with robots (for example) means installing high tech diagnostic stuff that enables high tech medical treatments which reduce the need for nurses. Nurses then face the problem of declining income because there are more nurses than needed.

eg patient treated after CAT scan has massively less invasive treatment than before CAT scan was invented, leaves hospital after one week instead of 3 months (other high tech stuff involved too). Result: nursing requirement falls to 10% of previous level. However, since double the number of patients survive with the less invasive treatment, (a) nursing requirement only falls to 20% of previous level, and (b) Everyone insists on the new treatment because they prefer to stay alive, and will pay more for it - so the manufacturer can charge a lot for his machine, and the hospital can't say no!.

I have just come from the bank: the tellers were replace by ATM machines, and not friendly sexbots. That is normal.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anne Thwacks]

will the workforce literally die off due to a "lack of creativity"

No. They will die cos damn fool anti-vaxxers will influence more and more illiterates as "workforce" is replaced by "idleforce"..

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anne Thwacks]

Maybe next that person could learn to be a personal assistant,give massages, or provide style consulting.

Only of nobody finds out about Alexa and sexbots.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[coastwalker]

Interestingly the economic system we have at present would like to give all of the benefits of the increased productivity of "robots" to the 0.01%, I suggest you figure out how to kill people and eat them if you want to survive in the next 50 years unless you change your politics from your current right wing persuasions.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is where some other wise slashdot poster said, let's not panic yet. You paint a pretty picture, but with the current pretty low unemployment and many companies having thousands of job openings, there's a lot of potential left. We need a lot of electronics technicians, engineers, software developers, IT - we can't hire and train people fast enough right now. The future you're predicting might not happen next year, and it might not happen for decades. Times are changing, but it's too early to know how fast or what the impact will be.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[G00F]

That falls apart if you believe that there's a subset of society that is fundamentally incapable of making the transition because of natural ability, talent, whatever, but I'm more optimistic about the capacity of humans to improve themselves given the opportunity to do so. OP claims by fiat that "we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix" without providing a justification for why that's the case.

What? Do you really think everyone can learn any job? I know right now, my office has a lot of idiots who take 6 months to a year to do something that takes copentent peopel less than a day. Now pull up your average/stereotypical wallmart, gas station, fast food employee who can't figure out why you are giving them 5.03 for a charge of 4.78.

Knowing "end of the line" can only be picked in hindsight. Right now the problem is getting people to see that there exists a problem. Unemployment numbers only look not bad because years ago (under clinton) they made changes. The problem being that only a portion of us need to work for all of us to consume, and with each improvement less people are needed. With less wealth going to less people the top 1% reap more.

Then the death spiral: When more consumers are out of work and consuming lesss, less people are needed to provide it. And repeat, with increased efficiency.

History shows that this turns into revolutions and wars, but if only 1,000 working people needed for a million to consume, we require more than just shift of power and wealth, but in idealogy.

So to recap, its about getting your electect officals to reconise the problem as 2 things.
1. Not everyone is needed to produce for everyone, and this is growing worse.
2. Not everyone is capable of doing all jobs.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine a robot that does nothing but takes blood samples? That is at least one nurse out of work per hospital. Can you imagine a robot that gives shots or distributes medicine? It is not that hard to replace people with robots. Sure we would still need nurses, but perhaps only 10% of current amount.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[losfromla]

I too agree, these are both great points parent and gp

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Arts- has very much hit the critical limit. There is already more art in the world than any one person can possibly experience
Personal assistants, massages, style consulting- maybe the last one. Personal assistants have already.moved into the palm of your hand- cell phones, tablets and the like. Massages, I've seen (and tried) robotic hydropressure massage tables. Style consulting? That really could be algorithmic as well, a simple historical database could feed an expert system as fashion seems to be cyclic.

New industries are a possibility, but why would a new industry not just go with robotic labor from the start?

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least 35 years we have seen a decline of jobs. But I wonder am I the only person who can see this. How many hours of work per year per person have we done since 1975? Draw a graph from that data.

But that is not even the problem. Because until 2 years ago, automation was a slow process. Then Google wanted to solve it.

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[losfromla]

Well, since I'm good at that, guess I've got nothing to worry about and will be well-fed during the coming automation apocalypse. To fix the wealth distribution problem, I suggest we start with consuming (literally) the most evil people at the highest ranks of wealth, let's not stop till the wealth distribution is good enough that most people aren't worried about me butchering them.
Regards,
  Hannibal Lecter M.D.

Re: Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Only rich can afford personal assistants and how many assistant do they want ir need? Most likely just one. Creating youtube videos is very likely profession but the more youtubers you have the less you earn from it as you compete with others. Same goes for games, books or anything that requires our time. Entertainment industry can grow only by eating itself or our sleep. We are talking about 90% of the human population. Do you really think they all can be personal assistants?

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[losfromla]

Going back a bit would probably be nice. However, what would be better would be wealth redistribution, resulting in a prosperous post-scarcity society for all natural humans. The best option is a very generous UBI with a few well-paying jobs for the truly gifted/motivated for whatever jobs those jobs are. Maybe plumbers and electricians?

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

I favor using energy as currency.

Anyone can produce it, it can't be easily stolen, counterfeited or printed up on a whim, and it's what actually makes things happen in the economy.

Charge up your "wallet" at home with solar and wind power, and take it to the store to "charge" your groceries!

Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens

[Obfiscator]

I've actually seen this in reports on development aid. Projects were put in place to dig wells, which reduced the amount of time families had to spend collecting water (what used to be an hour walk done several times a day was now 10 minutes).

The evaluators found that the family spent their newfound time doing...nothing. The hope (and claim) was that the extra time would be spent on economic activities, thus promoting development. The reality was that didn't happen.

Fault of the evaluation method? Perhaps. It was done a year later. Maybe the gains would have been seen a couple years later. But at least it shows that if you eliminate less-productive work, people aren't guaranteed to partake in more-productive work.

CLARIFICATION

[Anonymous Coward]

"Employees need to think of themselves as expendable in a way that propels them to accept whatever the over-classes wish for them."

sure

[Anonymous Coward]

its there but only in its infancy right now and many people do not really work around it and it is still quite expensive depending on what you can spend what you make annually and spend on actual employees of course.

The other 87%

[bobstreo]

Have jobs so shitty, even robots don't want to do them.

Re:The other 87%

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a shitty job that I wish the robots would hurry up and take over already so that I have an excuse to retire early.

Re:The other 87%

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain why I can't even get a job repairing and maintaining robots.

Re:The other 87%

[bobstreo]

Explain why I can't even get a job repairing and maintaining robots.

Because you don't have 20 years experience with robots that aren't even available, and you probably want a full time job at more than minimum wage, with benefits.

Re:The other 87%

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there will be a robot that repairs and maintains other robots, and it will be cheaper than you.

I'm going to be honest...

[NecroPuppy]

The day an AI can do all the bullshit paperwork I have to deal with, is the day I gladly let an AI take my job.

I'll go weave baskets or something for a living, at that point.

Re: I'm going to be honest...

[Anonymous Coward]

AI can already do bullshit paperwork. See Fixed, Donotpay.co.UK, and the various IRS tax filing programs.

Re:I'm going to be honest...

[rmdingler]

The day an AI can do all the bullshit paperwork I have to deal with, is the day I gladly let an AI take my job.

I'll go weave baskets or something for a living, at that point.

By the time a robotic replacement can do all the bullshit paperwork you have to deal with, Irona will also be making the break room coffee and weaving baskets during the time you you to waste in the bathroom and on vacation every year.

Re:I'm going to be honest...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll go weave baskets or something for a living, at that point.

I'm with you, dude. Probably a good idea to convert all the Primitive Technology videos to flip-book format.

Re:I'm going to be honest...

[NecroPuppy]

Just off the bathroom alone, that's going to be a lot of baskets.

Re:I'm going to be honest...

[rmdingler]

Just off the bathroom alone, that's going to be a lot of baskets.

Heh heh... and ultimately, who's the robot even making the coffee for?

Alternative theories

[Anonymous Coward]

13% of US citizens are above average intelligence and can think the problem through.

13% are atheist, the rest believe god will provide

13% are in such low paying jobs being on welfare will be an improvement

13% believe that FREEDOM won't solve anything.

It requires spending a massive amount of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people can agree: if there's one thing their bosses have in common, it's that they couldn't make a forward-thinking investment of capital to save their lives.

In other news

[rsilvergun]

86% of Americans are either not paying attention or not very bright. Ok, 85% (somebody's got to oil the robots).

Jokes aside the problem with robotic automation is that it'll chip away at the job market. It's not that your job's going away, it's your buddies. And now you're buddy is gunning for your job. For less pay. A lot less pay.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how many people here on slashdot would flunk high school econ.

I can see how Trump got elected.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Lubitron 5000.

Re:In other news

[zlives]

hey now!!... what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Let's agree on one thing, though

[Anonymous Coward]

NO ONE try to build a Creimerbot, OK? One of those fuckers is plenty enough!

Only 13 percent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on my circle of friends and acquaintances, I'd say it's a far higher number of jobs that could be replaced by robots and AI... maybe not in 5 years, but definitely in 10-20.

Re:Only 13 percent?

[93 Escort Wagon]

That's simply how many folks are worried about it. There's nothing stating that people are thinking intelligently about the subject.

1927 Only 13% feared stock market crash...

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's none of my business..

"87% of Americans are virtually robotic": True.

[Futurepower(R)]

Joke: I talked with a very old horse who said steam engines took his job.

True story: When paint rollers were introduced, painters protested.

Clickbait is best to speed read

[Anonymous Coward]

But why are rabbits after our jobs? Besides, rabbits don't gallop, they hop!

Betterwin's Law of Chewbacca says

[Anonymous Coward]

he is Nazi

5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk to me in 50.

Even 15 years from now things will be drastically different. Just as things now are incomprehensibly different than they were 15 years ago.

iPod, twitter, automation, yadda, yadda, yadda

Re:5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Things aren't incomprehensibly more different than they were 15 years ago.

In fact, the only real change is that after Dot-Bomb, companies ceaselessly try to justify their web presence as a profit center rather than a cost center.

That's why we now have pervasive, obtrusive advertising, SaaS and clickbait.

Re:5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just as things now are incomprehensibly different than they were 15 years ago."

Oh please provide just one example. Do we have matter transporters? Time travel? Honest politicians?

Re:5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

The first, maybe. The second would be a revolution in the laws of physics. The third is clearly excluded from this universe while it expands until hell freezes and even well after that.

Re:5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. So there's nothing "unrecognizable" from 15 years ago. We still had the Concorde in 2002 though.

Re: 5 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Today we have AI that can beat humans in image recognition, Go, Jeopardy and medical analysis. Oh and image recognition can be done in realtime and for multiple objects at the same time. If you are a programmer you can do image recognition app in a day with the help of tensorflow libs. This is something that was impossible for a large team two years ago.

Re:Is Chewbacca a homosexual?

[DontBeAMoran]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Printed house takes 24 hours to build

[Anonymous Coward]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GUdnrtnjT5Q
Sure it is small and you can laugh at it now, but by version 10 you're out of work mr. Carpenter

I'm not scared

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not scared that robots will take over my job. Seems massively wasteful to build a mechanical structure that can OCR code on a screen and then manipulate articulating fingers to type source into a keyboard.

Now scripts, on the other hand ....

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people have jobs that can't be replaced by a robot...I work with a family where I protect the youngest child, often yelling out "Danger, Will Robinson!" I'd like to see a robot do that!

the tread mill tread mill

[epine]

"Always be on top of your game, she says. "If your industry is becoming more digitally focused, get schooled on specific skills. Instead of being lax about your career, always stay ahead of the curve, keep your resume in circulation, ask yourself where the industry is headed and most importantly where you and your skills fit in."

Welcome to the 2020s, where having a job is a job.

It always goes like this. Whatever the Chicken Littles of the world are screaming about don't exactly come to pass, but something else changes, and not for the better.

The sordid underbelly of stagnant wages? Now you're working even harder in the margins to maintain your claim on the same dollar. This is yet another form of outsourcing to the employee, and I bet you can't even claim your office space at home devoted to all this "job upkeep" as a valid tax write-off.

Yet you are now 20% revenue-zero independent contractor, just to keep your day job in good standing.

Taunt Trump into outlawing robots

[BenJeremy]

Ask him what he is going to do about robots stealing our jobs, and call on him to outlaw robots.

Re:Taunt Trump into outlawing robots

[losfromla]

This actually sounds like a workable plan. Get his supporters behind it and you might get some traction.

not quite as simple as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, so now you are $5x times richer, and x number of people are $5 poorer.

Re:not quite as simple as you think

[hai_Priesty]

I think you're not getting parent's point. In economic terms wealth!=amount of cash one has, parent meant "richer" in "Consumer welfare" context (try google it). The purchasers now have $5 less per person in cash but they more enjoy more individual benefits derived from the consumption of the app. On related note, if you bought $2 of buns for breakfast, you most likely benefited much more from buying the $2 buns than growing the wheat, grinding it to flour and baking it yourself. That's how economy and division of labour is supposed to work, and money is just a medium of exchange and not wealth.

Re:not quite as simple as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless discussing economics with liberals, they are just too stupid to understand it at all. Watch them argue about how much a tax cut costs the government, and how much money the government "gives" people when they get a tax cut.

Liberal economics, in a nutshell...
All money belongs to the government, and only liberals are smart enough to allocate it. If someone makes money in a way they think it shouldn't be allocated, it is theft from them. Tax breaks costs government money because all money is owned by the government, they aren't letting you keep what you earned, they are deciding to give you more of their money.

Yes, they are that stupid. They can't understand difference between money and wealth. It has also become recently obvious they can't understand there is a difference between having health insurance and getting medical care either. Anyone could win a liberal primary by understanding how dumb they are.

Re: not quite as simple as you think

[Monster_user]

Probably stupid of me to reply to an AC,... The government "losing" money via tax cuts comes from a business mindset. Lower taxes means lower "profits". This is viewed as a loss in their revenue stream. Thus there is less money to budget with. Now budgetting against an economy is a little more complex, discounts and sales can increase revenue, and tax cuts could have a similar effect on the economy, and thus overall taxes.

I am guessing these people didn't hear.....

[Elfich47]

Slashdot had this story a couple days ago with the new robots that can reliably sew T-shirts and have started selling the production lines for that. I expect this will kick off a wave of production consolidation in the garment industry. I expect some of it will result in factories being built in the US. Those factories will employ a handful of people to produce what had previously taken hundreds or thousands of people.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

Re:I am guessing these people didn't hear.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot had this story a couple days ago with the new robots that can reliably sew T-shirts and have started selling the production lines for that. I expect this will kick off a wave of production consolidation in the garment industry. I expect some of it will result in factories being built in the US. Those factories will employ a handful of people to produce what had previously taken hundreds or thousands of people.

Only if the robots are cheaper than a building full of sweatshop workers.

Correlation?

[easyTree]

What proportion of the US are professional medical test subjects, blood donors, non-robot porn stars etc?

Bullshit.

[edgedmurasame]

Gallup had to abuse statistics to come up with that conclusion. That, and they falsely assume that the worker us defective - versus those implementing AI/ML.

I'm not worried either...

[newbie_fantod]

I'll be dead and long gone before bicycle mechanics are replaced by robots

Re:I'm not worried either...

[losfromla]

Sure, but your most lucrative customers will have lost their jobs and will find it cheaper to fix their own bikes with their now almost infinite "leisure" time. Thus you now have very little value (or work) since almost anyone can learn to do your job with a good book and some youtube videos.

Except that youre wrong.

[edgedmurasame]

The economy wrt AI is indistinguishable from a fixed pie, as destruction exceeds replacement - especially for displaced persons.

Your faith is misplaced.

[edgedmurasame]

That's presuming a replacement will arrive in time for and will accept the displaced. So far, AI/ML has proven otherwise.

They're coming for us.

[wkwilley2]

Only 13 percent of Americans are fearful that tech will eradicate their work opportunities in the near future

And the other 87% are in denial.

Journalists should not do math

[RhettLivingston]

There are currently about 155 million Americans working out of 326 million Americans or about 47.5%. The survey claims one in eight "workers" fear robots may take their jobs and then goes on to say 13% of "Americans". I guess that you're not American if you're not in the 47.5% that work. They could at least say "American workers". It matters.

Note that American total output and total employment are both at record levels. The dissatisfaction that people feel can be entirely attributed to the reduction in Americans working in manufacturing from over 20% to under 10% which, given that manufacturing output is also at its record levels, can be entirely attributed to efficiency increases that are mostly attributable to automation of one type or another.

This is not something that could happen. It is not theoretical. It is something that is already happening. The increases in these core middle class jobs have not kept up with the losses from automation since the '70s. It is the core fact behind the divergence in incomes.

Re:Journalists should not do math

[Marxist Hacker 42]

American population is at record levels too, which might account for how you can have total employment at record levels with only a 47.5% labor utilization rate.

Re:Journalists should not do math

[RhettLivingston]

Because that number includes children and retired people, it doesn't allow a good picture of labor participation which is the percentage of people who are in the right age range to work that are working.

The labor participation is currently hovering around 62.5%. This is down a bit from the peak in the 1998 time frame of around 67%, but still well above the norm of just below 60% that we experienced prior to the 1970 time frame.

If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site and change the "From" date to 1950, you get an interesting chart. Except for a bubble in the 2007-8 time frame caused by the banking industry fraud, labor participation has been steadily declining since around 1998.

Since labor force participation is as much or more an indicator of need to work than available work, this is an inverse prosperity chart. Unemployment is very low right now, millions of jobs are available, and labor force participation is not increasing. Thus the pay is not enough to draw people into working. People have enough that they aren't desperate.

Re:Journalists should not do math

[MooseMiester]

OR the government (local, state, federal) has become so greedy and so completely screwed up that they have actually created most of this mess. But that is a very unpopular notion if you believe that the word government and solution belong in the same sentence. Maybe, just maybe, the politicians - who during this time have become fabulously wealthy - who are the ones spinning these tales where it's not their fault...

60+% believe in Angels, they're all Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

60+% believe in Angels, they're all Morons see!

Not Surprising

[xvan]

I'd go with: 13% of US citizens are thin foil hat nutjobs. When job automation reduces the job market the salaries will be pushed down, which will reduce the investment on job automation and push the unemployalipse further away.
Also, the biggest field currently being targeted by automation are drivers, and autonomous cars won't be a thing for the next 10 to 20 years. And all existing transport floats won't be phased the day after the autonomous vehicles get regulated, so there'll time for the old dogs on the field to retire.
Job automation should worry the Alpha Generation.

Re:Not Surprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I give your average truck driver 5 years to move to the third world or go north to work on the ice roads. Everything in the lower 48 can be done driverless with GPS.

In capatalist America...

[BeCre8iv]

The robot which scans your groceries is you.

A real threat

[eskayp]

How soon will the retirement robots be forcing us geezers out of retirement?

87 % reasonable Americans - 1 biased "expect"

[bothorsen]

Every study that's made so far shows that robots actually complement people in jobs. And there's not a single sign that this is about to change.

People worry about all those robots taking the jobs, but that's just silly. I heard a guy who have a very big and old farm here in Denmark say that in the 1800s they had more than a 150 people working on the land. Today they have 3. Machines have always helped us improve the output of our labour, and it will continue this way.

Now it's robots, and the media are trying to scare you into thinking this somehow changes the picture much more than the tractor did. And as usual with nothing other than "well, this is obvious to everyone" to back it up.

And the "expert" in this story works for an online job posting company that wants you to apply more jobs. Wow, there's a bit of news. What else would you expect her to say. "Your job is in danger and you should think about using our service to solve the problem." I assume no actual expert wanted to say what the reporter wanted to hear.

Re:87 % reasonable Americans - 1 biased "expect"

[Marxist Hacker 42]

" I heard a guy who have a very big and old farm here in Denmark say that in the 1800s they had more than a 150 people working on the land. Today they have 3. "

Looks to me like 147 jobs got taken by automation. By what math do you get "robots will take no jobs" from that?

Re:87 % reasonable Americans - 1 biased "expect"

[losfromla]

So, in 200 years, there was a net loss of 147 jobs in that farm alone. You're totally right, mechanization and automation will always cost jobs and concentrate wealth at the "top".

Robots can replace bankers too

[Anonymous Coward]

Last laugh is ours, assholes. If you stomp out Bitcoin, something bigger and better will replace it.

There were the robots at Lowe's

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember sales assistants at hardware stores need to be more than a search service youtube John Oliver Last Week Tonight Clip

Robots don't make good office buddies

[omfglearntoplay]

One thing to keep in mind, no matter how much money the business owners want, they'll always want humans to talk to. If you are in the US, might I remind you to put on deodorant, shower daily, have a few small talk options available at short notice, and learn to be nice to people... it might just keep you employed when the robots take over.

Seriously though, advice from humans can be emotional... advice from AI is always cold. Business people react half rationally and half emotionally. They always need their lieutenants. And the best bosses like to chat about real life (or video game life) just as much as business... so no, I don't think robots are going to replace every job in existence.

Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain why I can't even get a job repairing and maintaining robots.

Because you want to be a coal-miner, because it's your God-given right to be a coal-miner. An' don't let nobody ne'er take that away from ya, boy!!

Everybody wants to be a coal-miner.

All Heil Trump. Trump will save us all!!

Hurrah!!

Who will run robots

[Yacine B.]

Before robots come, there will be a huge need of human brains and human hands to manage and put robots together in factories as they can't make robots with robots because robots are not here yet. Yacine B. - TheTechyHome.com

Re:Who will run robots

[Anne Thwacks]

there will be a huge need of human brains

You predict a rise in the population of zombie robots?

Re:Who will run robots

[djinn6]

It's much easier to build a robot-building robot than it is to build the robot. One is a series of deterministic steps, taking raw materials at one end and spitting out robots on the other. The other is an endless combination of vague and sometimes unknown steps that does everything a human does.

Programming the robots will be a lot of work. But the vast majority of people hold a very small number of job types. You might need a few thousand software guys to automate the most common jobs, but that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions of jobs they will make obsolete.

Other mosts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people believe they'll get rich someday:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi8ruWQgZHWAhVEyoMKHUIMBwwQFggmMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkenrapoza%2F2012%2F07%2F16%2Fthe-impossible-dream-being-rich%2F&usg=AFQjCNER1EFrPfhaO6m2Z4a6tXXGOeDSBA

Only 38% of Americans believe in the big bang theory (the scientific theory, not the show,) and only 48% believe in the theory of evolution.
http://guff.com/americans-amaze-scientists-with-their-stupidity

Only 55% of the Americas (generally) know of the Holocaust and believe it's been described accurately.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-world-is-full-of-holocaust-deniers/370870/

Which goes to prove.... most people are stupid. And what "most people believe" has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not most people will become jobless without intervention.

stupid article

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, not enough people are afraid, so out trots this idiot telling them to be afraid and work even harder for their masters because robots ooga booga.

Reason I don't fear AI? Indians. Two reasons. One, software written by Indians never works, let alone well, so no weapons deployed with Indians in control will ever be able to hurt me. Two, Indians are basically robots and they're already here destroying everything so why would worry about _future_ attacks from artificial intelligence?

This just in

[genfail]

87% of American workers are stupid. News at 11.

In the other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

93% of americans believe they are better than average drivers.

Displaced by a robot

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a robot, and another robot took my job
I find this completely unacceptable

only 13% - really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the public don't understand how it can happen at all!!