Bankers Publicly Embracing Robots Are Privately Fearing Job Cuts (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Within the upper echelons of many financial firms, there's a lot of soul searching as executives prepare to roll out a new generation of technology. Publicly, they're upbeat, predicting machines will perform almost all repetitive tasks, freeing humans to focus on more valuable pursuits. Privately, many confide to peers, consultants and sometimes journalists that they're worried about what will happen to their staffs -- and what to tell them. There's also uncertainty. Maybe it's all overblown, executives say, because the tech will be hard to implement and humans will find new roles. Or perhaps it's the beginning of the end for legions of professionals in one of the world's most lucrative fields. Can jobs held by office-dwelling millionaires disappear like those on factory floors? The result, is that employees aren't getting a clear message on what's to come.

For a rosy scenario, look to McKinsey & Co. In July, the consulting firm published a report estimating machines are ready to assume roughly a third of the work now performed by banks' rank and file. The authors framed it as positive: People will have more time to tend to clients, conduct research or brainstorm ideas. So far, it noted, firms at the forefront aren't slashing jobs. At JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the most tech-savvy banks, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon predicted in June that his workforce will more likely grow than shrink over the next 20 years. Technology may displace workers, he's said, but it also creates opportunities. Yet in interviews, about a dozen Wall Street executives and consultants responsible for deploying technologies -- and steeped in their capabilities -- were more bearish on humans. Machines will take over task after task, they said, and banks simply won't need nearly as many people.

Comments

We all know this is comming

[rsilvergun]

and I'm guessing we're not going to do a damn thing about it because a good chunk of us can't bear the thought of somebody having a nice things in life and not working relentlessly to get it. It comes down to an antiquated concept of 'fairness'. They worked and sacrificed and suffered to get what little they've got in life so why shouldn't everybody else? Hell, I've seen it with some of my liberal LGBTQ friends even, who were upset that the younger generation of LGBTQ folks didn't go through as much shit as they did. It's a pretty common sentiment and one that the ruling elite have always been good at exploiting.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm thinking we're in for a second industrial revolution. And that includes the 80 years of rampant unemployment, poverty, social unrest and war they don't talk about in grade school.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

That second industrial revolution will NOT end, it will go full throttle to a dystopia, sprinkled with mass genocide.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

No it fucking wonâ(TM)t, calm down. Human beings have and will always improve their quality of life.

Even if there is a work-less dystopia, all those displaced hordes or workers can start their own semi-autonomous or autonomous-less existence or society, and provide themselves with whatever means they want. Also, Iâ(TM)m sorry, but âoefairâ has and will never mean taking something from someone and giving it to someone else, based solely on the amount those two have, unless the giver voluntarily agrees to. Anything else is robbery at gunpoint. There is no âoefairnessâ. Thereâ(TM)s chance, circumstance, and a âoerace to the topâ. If you didnâ(TM)t make it, ask for help, or help yourself. Donâ(TM)t expect someone else (the government in this case) to take it from some other schmuck and give it to you, because you âoedeserveâ it.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Monster_user]

It all depends on who owns the land when the s*** hits the fan.

If enough land is held by the working class, they can survive. If there isn't enough land usable by the working class, that could be a real problem.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Powercntrl]

and I'm guessing we're not going to do a damn thing about it because a good chunk of us can't bear the thought of somebody having a nice things in life and not working relentlessly to get it.

Nobody is ever going to get nice things without working hard to earn them. At best, they'd have their basic needs met and probably not feel much fulfillment in knowing their existence amounts to being a burden on society.

Charles Dickens pretty much nailed the conservative mentality towards this in A Christmas Carol. If those who are unable to work can't make use of the existing social services already in place, then they may as well die to eliminate their burden on society. Notwithstanding the negative stigma associated with suicide, obviously.

Automation reduces the need for human labor, yet all humans need to be productive members of society. It's quite a paradox to solve. To paraphrase Agent Smith from The Matrix, there is another society on this planet that found a way for every member of their society to be productive: The Amish.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Given 40% of the land in California is held by the Federal Government, another 20% is locked up in 'wilderness preserves' and that causes a doubling of housing prices...yeah I'd say it is a problem.

To say nothing of the 90% of Utah and Nevada owned by the Feds...

Re:We all know this is comming

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, since the second industrial revolution ended in 1914, those "80 years of rampant unemployment, poverty, social unrest and war" have been happily behind us for two decades.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a few issues with your logic.

I agree that people should want to be productive members of society. However, people aren't paid according to the contribution they make to society, but rather how the market values the goods and services they produce. For example, a parent who raises a child well to be a productive member of society has made a valuable contribution to society in the process, yet we don't pay them for their contribution. Although the United States provides a tax deduction for dependents (not sure what other countries do), this does not measure the effort and skill to raise the child well.

Although it has changed in recent decades, stay-at-home mothers were once very common. Those women didn't get paid for goods and services unless they ran a business out of their house. However, they did contribute to society by raising their children well. I also believe our society was better off when parents, both mothers and fathers, spent more time around their children and less time working. Unfortunately, they don't get paid for that contribution to society.

There are plenty of other examples of the differences in how people are paid versus their contributions to society. Furthermore, there are plenty of jobs that are essential for society to function, but do not pay well. For example, the building I work in is cleaned by janitors at night who aren't paid particularly well for their services. The low pay is because the job doesn't require skilled labor and it isn't difficult to find a replacement. The market doesn't place great value on the services they provide, yet they are necessary for the workplace to function. If the scientists working in the building during the day had to take time away to clean the building, they would be less productive. The market doesn't account for that in valuing the work done by the janitors. That's why low income workers get tax credits, because they provide essential services and we need to ensure that they have enough to live on. We need to ensure that someone is providing those services.

I'm also not convinced that providing a universal basic income would make society less productive. I'd love to innovate and have the opportunity to start my own business. However, I depend on the monthly pay from my current job, and the risk is too great to leave that job and focus on my business. A universal basic income might remove that risk and give me the freedom to focus on innovating and starting my own business rather than being tied to my current job. I might be able to make a greater contribution to society if I could do that, but right now, it isn't a viable option. There are many other potential innovators and entrepreneurs who don't take that risk because it's too great. Sure, there are people who would mooch of of a universal basic income. However, it is entirely possible that there would be a net benefit to society because of the freedom to take risks as entrepreneurs and innovators knowing that they're basic needs would be met through a universal basic income and universal health care.

Does it matter if some people get to mooch off of the system if society, overall, is advanced? I suspect that a universal basic income and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met would actually lead to a more productive society than we have now.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Workers get the desert, rich get the dessert.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Talla]

and I'm guessing we're not going to do a damn thing about it because a good chunk of us can't bear the thought of somebody having a nice things in life and not working relentlessly to get it. It comes down to an antiquated concept of 'fairness'.

What it comes down to is if you really want to pay twice the price for banking services just so that bankers can keep their highly paid jobs. I do banking in both Norway and Spain, and it is significantly more expensive in Spain, where they still have a lot of physical banks everywhere. The difference between the deposit rate and borrowing rate is about 1.5 percentage points in Norway and 2.5 percentage points in Spain. In addition the Spanish banks charges all kinds of fees for banking operations, while there are almost no fees in Norwegian banks. It's actually much cheaper for me to send money from a Norwegian bank to a Spanish bank than between two Spanish banks, unless the sum is very small.

Re:We all know this is comming

[tomtomtom]

The differences between countries in terms of how banks charge are quite varied and what you are observing is a difference in the structure of charges more than anything - in some countries banks effectively subsidise the "day-to-day" banking for individuals (in the UK to the point of it being completely free) out of other parts of the operations - usually these days by charging business customers much more for payments, account maintenance etc. There are differences in cost structure but those aren't really a huge part of most banks' overall costs.

The largest costs they have, and the ones they really worry about are (1) how much it costs them to borrow money (deposits are the cheapest source but most banks don't fund themselves exclusively with deposits and the extent to which they do varies significantly) and (2) how much they lose on bad loans. Spanish banks face significantly higher costs than Nordic banks on both of those costs, which is why you observe Spanish banking being more costly to consumers.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Just 100 years ago the red banner with hammer and sickle was born, now you just have to raise it.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

The Spanish banks are all zombies, they are nickel and diming because It's the only way for them to stay slightly afloat.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Kjella]

Well, people tend to take things they haven't worked for as granted and that goes both for technology and society. My dad was born before WW2, he remembers Norway as occupied by the Nazis. I can't appreciate our freedom the way he can, I've never lived it. And that means we sometimes lose perspective, like how a few deaths to terror is actually a lot better than the millions upon millions killed in the last great war. While I can read a history book I can't really grasp how it was to live before TV, but I do remember the time before cell phones and I understand the difference that makes far better. I'm not saying it's always so, but often those who have worked and sacrificed and suffered are under-appreciated by posterity, not by intent or malice but simply because we haven't truly felt the impact they made. For us it's "always" been so.

Re: We all know this is comming

[peragrin]

Tech is already replacing office staff. 30 years ago you needed 2-3 book keepers for a small but growing office. Now one person with quick books can do the job and still have time to do reporting too.

Accountants and finance people are being replaced with software that can sort, collate and show data in pretty colors for the executives.

Why do you need an assistant when the computer can do scheduling and call blocking for you? Cortana, Alexa?

Why would we do anything about it? The boring repetative business tasks are what need to be replaced. Most of finance, accounting, lawyers, job is doing the same boring shit over and over again. All of that can be automated. Can you imagine if Google could index every legal journal so that lawyers could quickly search case history? That would double the number of lawyers able to practice law instead of bieng research assistants.

Erp and business logic and tracking have been streamlining businesses for decades and no one calls it Automation.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

And, 50-100 years ago, this is exactly what the _goal_ was. Less work, more time.

Re: We all know this is comming

[lessthan]

And instead, our productivity went up. We had more time to do more work. It is not a great trade.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Kiuas]

Does it matter if some people get to mooch off of the system if society, overall, is advanced? I suspect that a universal basic income and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met would actually lead to a more productive society than we have now.

Entirely agreed. One of the reasons we're trialing basic income here in Finland (not for everyone at the moment, it's an experiment where a group of people on unemployment benefits have been transitioned to basic income) is that the current models of social security are outdated and no longer in tune with the way the job market functions. Back in the 60s-80s when the Finnish welfare system was created (much of it being copied from our neighbors to the west in Sweden who, having been spared the 2nd world war had had a head start in building theirs) there was still an idea going on that full-time employment is the end goal of all healthy people. This meant that the unemployment benefit was to be used as a mechanism in between full-time contracts or for people who've just graduated.

However, as we know throughout the west outsourcing and especially automation have already changed the landscape drastically. Companies hire less and less people on permanent contracts and instead favor a gig-based economy. This creates a lot of issues with the current old fashioned social security system because if someone's unemployed and they take up say a 2 week contract or a part time job, this immediately either entirely cancels or massively shrinks their unemployment benefit. This leads to a situation where people who're unemployed do not want to pick up such job-offerings because it affects the stability of their income. If your benefit is cancelled because you got work for a few weeks, you have to re-apply for it after that which takes time and may make a significant dent in your income. The same goes for micro-businesses and self-employment. Even if someone has a skillset that they could use to make some money on the side while looking for a job, many people choose not to do so because there's a real risk of the officials saying: 'aha, I see you've been tutoring students and being paid for it, that makes you an entrepreneur and we're now going to slash or revoke your benefit'. So it's pretty much an 'all or nothing' scenario right now where the system either expects you to be unemployed or working, there's no 'in between' mode and that's becoming more and more of an issue.

Unfortunately our current government is center-right and blind to the current realities so they're working their assess off to make the situation worse, not better (the basic income trial mentioned earlier was created prior to the current government). We have a couple hundred thousand more unemployed people than open job offerings at this point (the '08 crisis combined with the implosion of Nokia created a huge crater on the job market form which we've not fully recovered, people don't realize this but Nokia was responsible for almost a third of all of our exports), but the government, despite being aware of this, brazenly and openly lies and claims that the problem is that unemployed people arr all 'lazy' and just wanna mooch off the system. So using the 'lazy moochers' as a lame excuse they're creating all kinds of bureaucratic contraptions creating more and more pitfalls for the unemployed people to go through for them to maintain their benefit, such as increasing the amount of paperwork and documentation that has to be provided lest the benefit be cut, and even in some cases forcing people to take what amount to unpaid internships or face a slash in their income (this is actually an illegal thing to do, but they do not seem to care anymore, it also skews the job market even further by injecting free labor into the system which reduces the number of paid positions). This is especially idiotic because the right to social security is in the constitution here, so even if a person falls out of the unemployment benefit, the state is still obligated by law to make s

Re: We all know this is comming

[plopez]

Been to Syria lately?

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, those jerks in the California Government, preventing SF from expanding into the Alturas wilderness that is 500 miles away. You tell 'em.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really suggesting that we further subsidize parents for having children? I filed taxes professionally and there are definitely people who try and use child tax credit/increased EITC for dependents as a way to game the system. If anything, I think we should be encouraging parents to have less kids. This goes double if there is less of a need for labor in the coming generations.

Re: We all know this is comming

[tsstahl]

Can you imagine if Google could index every legal journal so that lawyers could quickly search case history? That would double the number of lawyers able to practice law instead of bieng [sic] research assistants.

Westlaw and LexisNexis already are this Google for law of which you speak. For a couple decades now. Your prediction is not true so says history.

You have to try another analogy to make your point. I suggest something automotive in nature as this _is_ slashdot. :)

Re: We all know this is comming

[peragrin]

Westlaw and lexisnexis have severe user restrictions or at least did 10 years ago.

Also older case law which might still be relevant were not in those searches. As records weren't digitized

Re:We all know this is comming

[ichimunki]

Can't tell if sarcasm, cluelessness, or troll.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Dripdry]

Oh yeah, what a shame: Wouldn't dare change zoning laws or build some skyscrapers (that are earthquake-proof), have to keep expanding outward into a never-ending suburb.
I've lived there. LA doesn't need ANY more land, they need to build UP. Same with San Francisco.

Re:We all know this is comming

[K. S. Kyosuke]

None of the above, just a simple statement of facts.

Re: We all know this is comming

[ichimunki]

Nobody is having children to game the tax system. Once they have the children, perhaps, they are happy to use them as tools to "game" the tax system. However, the tax system was set up to be gamed by people having children. One reason we need all these children is that Social Security is basically a Ponzi scheme. It requires a growing pool of people paying in to cover those being paid out, at least until an equilibrium is reached. Inflation can help offset the number of payers needed a bit, except that then people want cost-of-living adjustments to their payments so the value of their payments doesn't decrease as they age. Of course, there are probably other, better ways to increase the pool of potential payers-in than having children... like letting people immigrate and become citizens. This routinely avoids the need to subsidize those people's first two decades in life with schooling and the like. But this probably won't stop most people from having children, too. It's like it's some sort of basic human drive.

Re: We all know this is comming

[AmazingRuss]

They could... but they won't. They'll concentrate on fucking each other out of the scraps available to them.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but I hear the Soylent Green is delicious!!

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Given 40% of the land in California is held by the Federal Government, another 20% is locked up in 'wilderness preserves' and that causes a doubling of housing prices...yeah I'd say it is a problem.

To say nothing of the 90% of Utah and Nevada owned by the Feds...

Like, who the hell WANTS to own part of Utah or Nevada?

Re: We all know this is comming

[apoc.famine]

I agree with most of your comment, but there is one place I disagree: UBI
 
For a long time I was on the UBI wagon, believing that it would solve a lot of the problems we're facing with the mismatch between skills in the labor force and jobs available. But moving from a somewhat rough neighborhood to a somewhat well-off suburb has changed my opinion.
 
The largest amount of trouble in both neighborhoods is caused by people with nothing to do. In the rough neighborhood it was the teens and young adults suffering 20% unemployment, and in the white suburb it is the teens and college kids living with mom and dad.
 
I don't think we're culturally equipped to have a large percentage of our population with their basic needs met with nothing to do. As you noted, there is a stigma of "lazy" applied to people getting benefits. Culturally, our self-worth is tied to what we do for our families and our community. If we do nothing, that does hit self-esteem, and it does cause mental stress. That, in turns, leads to some poor behaviors and substance abuse, if we see no way out of that trap. It leads to people trying to find some entertainment, and going to more and more extreme lengths to bring some excitement into their life.
 
I think that instead of UBI we're going to have to go to make-work programs. This is what pulled the US out of the great depression, created the highway system, and built a lot of the infrastructure of the country. This is work that could be done better, faster, and cheaper by robots. This is work that requires minimal skill, minimal supervision, but which makes communities better.
 
But with all that said, it's work. It's exchanging labor for money, getting your hands dirty, feeling tired but accomplished at the end of the day. It's something you can show your kids and say, "that's what I made". And yes, we'll still need disability pay, for those that can't.
 
Until we have a cultural revolution where we no longer draw some of our value as a human being from working, and until we have a cultural revolution where we invest our free time in making our communities better, we can't not work. And that means we can't do UBI.

Re:We all know this is comming

[computational super]

It comes down to an antiquated concept of 'fairness'. They worked and sacrificed and suffered to get what little they've got in life so why shouldn't everybody else?

With fuel to the fire added by people like you who genuinely seem to believe the exact opposite - that anybody who worked or sacrificed or suffered or who has anything right now didn't come by it honestly and deserves to burn in penance for their elitist past.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

>their existence amounts to being a burden on society
On the robots building robots.

>all humans need to be productive members of society
Do I even need to poke holes in this? It's so swiss cheese I have decision paralysis - I could even Godwin the last guy who said the infirm need to be eliminated.

I agree with incentivizing productivity, I even agree with population reduction (viable means pending), but your biases are dangling out of your pants.

Re: We all know this is comming

[boneglorious]

I think we can't have that revolution as long as we all have to work desperately to pay our ever-increasing bills. We have to get off the treadmill before we can take a breath and then start to figure out our next steps.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Green Mountain Bot]

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Streetlight]

I agree fully with Kjella's comments and here's some added perspective. In my wife and my cases, we are both children of parents who matured and started out during the Great Depression of the 1930s and were non college grads, working class folks. One thing that was drummed into us was that we needed to save money. Things were to be done on the cheap. Toothpaste cost money and if there wasn't any around, we used baking soda to brush our teeth. Dad did car repairs himself - I remember him grinding the valves in a Chevy and when the VW beetle needed valve repair, he and I took the engine out and did it ourselves. There are many other lessons we learned about how to economize to save for a good future. My folks have had a financially secure retirement because of this and so will my wife and I because of our saving-money-mentality.

Skip to the next generation. It seems a week doesn't go by when I read what these folks have saved. The statistics may not be completely accurate, but something like more than half of those Americans 50 years or older have no more than $50,000 saved for retirement, if that. Social Security will not provide for a financially secure retirement, particularly considering a potential long life. Add to this the economic disruptions that might occur, and there may be a serious problem associated with a large majority of retirees who have an income that can't support them. Move in with the kids? The kids may not be able to afford keeping their elderly parents in the basement because they also live from check-to-check. Add the unemployable grandchildren to the mix who graduated from college and need space at home and we could be in for interesting times.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Green Mountain Bot]

The largest amount of trouble in both neighborhoods is caused by people with nothing to do. In the rough neighborhood it was the teens and young adults suffering 20% unemployment, and in the white suburb it is the teens and college kids living with mom and dad.

You're missing an important point: lack of income means inability to pursue interests. Give people money, they'll spend it doing things they enjoy, which means that they will have things to do.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Green Mountain Bot]

If that is your takeaway from his comment, you might want to spend some of you hard work and sacrifice on learning to read for comprehension.

Re:We all know this is comming

[careysub]

The OP is unfamiliar with the various periodizations of subsequent "industrial revolutions" offered by recent historians. Only the First Industrial Revolution (beginning circa 1770) is universal and unambiguous in the historical literature.

The term "Second Industrial Revolution" as you characterize it was only offered in a standardized form in 1972 by David Landes in Prometheus Unbound and is not universally accepted among historians even today.

There is clearly a third phase of industrialization in the Twentieth Century, not yet commonly called the "Third Industrial Revolution" (there is a terrible book by that name that is not a serious work of technological history and means something quite different).

Rather continuing with increasingly contentious and unstandardized enumerations I prefer to call what the OP is referring to as a "Second Industrial Revolution" as the "Cybernetic Revolution" that describes exactly what the revolution involves.

Re:We all know this is comming

[ichimunki]

Well, it would help if I had read your post correctly. Although I'm not sure the last two decades have been free of problems, it's nothing like the industrialized wars of the first half of the 20th century, that's for sure.

Re: We all know this is comming

[careysub]

One thing that is invariably left out in discussions of the Social Security system, the absence of which is especially glaring when someone begins to talk up the "Ponzi Scheme" notion is the reality of productivity growth, which has been 1.7% a year since the First Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, and is at least 1% over recent years. Even with productivity growth this low the actual per capita wealth doubles over a 70 year period, so that SS payments are being made from a steadily wealthier society. It isn't all just demographics.

Re: We all know this is comming

[zilym]

You and I may have useful things to do and interests to pursue. But a lot of people don't have any such inclination.

If UBI becomes reality, I'm betting we're going to see a whole lot more alcohol consumption and drug use.

Somebody has to work to produce all those things people on UBI are going to consume. Why should I have to work and pay for other people's good time?

Re: We all know this is comming

[ichimunki]

Except that social security is not funded by per capita wealth. It's funded by a tax on income, which is measured in dollars. And while there is a trust fund in place it is not secured by any actual wealth, it is a debt owed by the Treasury to the SSA. The money "invested" in SSA has been spent and the only source of being able to make up for any shortfall in the future is to print more money, borrow the money, or reduce payments. The program fits the definition of Ponzi scheme perfectly. The ability of the system to pay out to previous investors is 100% dependent on getting new investors to pay in or asking existing investors to pay more. Now, obviously, the term "Ponzi scheme" is loaded, but highlights the trouble with the way the social security system works. Unlike a Ponzi scheme, participation is not voluntary, but then Social Security is not intentionally deceiving anyone either and we have an incredible amount of data available as to how the system is doing. And it may turn out just fine, because (as you point out) as people have more wealth they can easily afford more taxes or lowered benefits, but "per capita" is the troubling word there. That's an arithmetic mean, which does not guarantee that the impacts of new taxes or lowered benefits will affect all wealth holders in equal relative measure.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Kiuas]

Somebody has to work to produce all those things people on UBI are going to consume. Why should I have to work and pay for other people's good time?

You shouldn't, and you won't. Pretty much no-one will. Most production will be entirely automated (in the west) within the next half a century or so. That's precisely the point: we will have immense production capabilities that require next to no workforce, but without UBI or an equivalent system, there will be no-one to buy any of those things which will lead to major issues.

Re: We all know this is comming

[ichimunki]

Somebody has to work to produce all those things people on UBI are going to consume. Why should I have to work and pay for other people's good time?

Because not working and just consuming drugs or drinking a lot really isn't a "good time"? And the people likely to be willing to just live at the lowest level available to be able to indulge their drug addictions are probably already doing that... only instead of providing them with the basic comforts via UBI, you are quite possibly funding their stay in the local prison instead. And prison for offenses like becoming homeless or low-level stealing or prostitution or whatever happens to drug addicts is expensive and highly dehumanizing to the people involved (both guards and prisoners). Wouldn't it be better to just give these folks a place to live, enough food to live on, and then let them decide when they are ready to seek help without destroying their lives?

Most people are going to want more than subsistence level living just so they can drink cheap liquor or take drugs. UBI affords all of us some luxury to invest sweat equity in starting a business (especially businesses where the majority of the investment needed is labor). This is good for young adults, adults who need a career change, or people who have had some unfortunate circumstance decimate their savings and/or income stream.

Re: We all know this is comming

[BLToday]

Like, who the hell WANTS to own part of Utah or Nevada?

I do. I want to own Nevada because once The Big One hit California, that area will be beachfront property. I just need a way to set off the San Andreas fault.

Re: We all know this is comming

[apoc.famine]

UBI isn't designed to give people money to spend doing what they enjoy. It's designed to provide a basic income which allows us to do away with many different programs, such as welfare, unemployment, food stamps, social security, etc. It's not designed to do anything more than provide enough to live on. If you like a free hobby like walks in the park and writing poetry, then UBI might work. But if a hobby costs any amount of real money, you're not going to be able to afford it on UBI.
 
The 15-25 year old kids in my decently wealthy neighborhood have plenty of money and lots of toys and hobbies. But they still occasionally do stupid shit like lighting the shredded rubber chips on the playground on fire and blowing up mailboxes with soda-bottle bombs because they get bored.
 
Boredom causes a lot of issues. Working keeps people out of trouble. When you have to be up at 6am to go to work, you generally don't get a fractured skull at 2am outside of a bar because you probably went to bed at 10 or 11. A very large portion of the social unrest I see in my community is boredom driven. UBI doesn't fix that. A job does.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Robotron23]

Very good and informative comment. Thanks for taking the time to contribute.

Re: We all know this is comming

[zilym]

Someone has to build those automated systems. Someone has to maintain them. Someone has to upgrade them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

What you're describing is productivity improvements to the Nth degree such that only a small handful of people are producing everything that the economy has to offer.

Everyone outside of that small handful of productive people will by definition have NOTHING to offer in return to reward the productive few for their effort.

As a member of the productive class, I have no motivation to accept UBI dollars for my produce. The only people that can legitimately trade with me are other producers -- they are the only people that produce anything of value to offer in return for my productive efforts.

Right now, a dollar printed out of thin air and a dollar earned through productive effort are largely indistinguishable.

If the number of people actually producing goods collapses to a small handful, it will become increasingly obvious who's dollar is backed by production and who's dollar is just worthless UBI.

UBI solves nothing.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Areyoukiddingme]

If the number of people actually producing goods collapses to a small handful, it will become increasingly obvious who's dollar is backed by production and who's dollar is just worthless UBI.

Really? How will you tell? Will you just assume that because the majority of dollars are UBI, they're all worthless? And do you refuse Bill Gates' dollars today? He's not doing anything to get them anymore. Hasn't in years. Are his dollars worthless?

As a member of the productive class, I have no motivation to accept UBI dollars for my produce. The only people that can legitimately trade with me are other producers -- they are the only people that produce anything of value to offer in return for my productive efforts.

Right. So today, you only accept dollars from farmers, miners, and lumberjacks, right? Somehow I doubt it. You're probably just a Libertarian (big L) jackass with an inflated notion of the wondrous "value" of his own productivity. I've got news for you, snowflake. Your marvelous productivity wouldn't be missed if you died this afternoon. Nothing you do is remotely important or particularly valuable to anybody at all. You're lucky anybody is willing to take your worthless dollars.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

As a member of the productive class, I have no motivation to accept UBI dollars for my produce. The only people that can legitimately trade with me are other producers -- they are the only people that produce anything of value to offer in return for my productive efforts.

And if automation gets the cost of doing business down far enough, people will do it as a hobby, or because they get the warm fuzzies from contributing, or for status - there are lots of motivators that don't include money, if the fixed costs are low enough.

Then, once they've undercut you on price, no-one will buy from you.

I'm guessing the UBI will sound better to you at that point - you might also have some more time to reflect on the relationship between not being a member of the "productive class", and circumstances beyond one's control.

Re:We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm uncertain what the relevance of your anecdote is to the present discussion, but here's one of my own: my grandfather died a lot poorer than he needed to be, despite living within his means, because one of his fundamental beliefs was that it was foolish to own your own home. He'd seen far too many of his friends lose everything when their mortgages went deeply underwater during the Great Depression. So he never bought anything, and missed out on the big increase in house prices during the 40s. And as a self employed man, he missed out on the defined benefit pensions that were [more] common in those years following WWII.
My point I guess is that while it's nice your ancestors "scrimp and save" strategies worked out well for them, it may not have been the only thing contributing to their prosperity, nor is it necessarily the best strategy for all times and places. For example, rapid inflation - should it ever re-emerge - would quickly erode the value of the savings derived from hoarding string and rationing toothpaste.
But as I mentioned above, I'm not sure what any of this has to do with UBI. Different times require different strategies maybe?

Re: We all know this is comming

[Green Mountain Bot]

How exactly are these people going to be able to afford alcohol and drugs if they can't afford to fund a hobby? Going to movies is a hell of a lot less expensive than going to a bar. Going fishing is a hell of a lot less expensive than going on a crack bender. Learning to paint is a lot less expensive than learning how to have a meth habit. Basically, your argument boils down to "Idle hands do the devil's work". Maybe the only thing keeping you from getting into massive amounts of trouble is having to go to work, but for far more people, the need to work gets in the way of doing the things they actually care about. Work isn't meaningful for the vast majority of people - it is something they do in order to be able to pay the bills. And you also assume that UBI would be the cause of lack of work, rather than a way to stabilize society as the need for unskilled laborers goes away. Even if the "work keeps people out of trouble" argument were to have any merit, it doesn't address the fact that the work is going away. The whole point of automation is to make it so employers don't have to pay for low-level work. If they're not interested in paying low-level workers to do work for them, they're not going to have any interest in paying taxes to pay low level workers to do busy work. Really, I don't see anything in your argument that doesn't come from the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Anonymous Coward]

Killer-robots will be super-profitable and solve lots of problems to boot!

Re: We all know this is comming

[Glarimore]

Someone has to build those automated systems. Someone has to maintain them. Someone has to upgrade them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

So how will people incapable of acquiring the skills to fill these kinds of advanced positions be employed?

Re: We all know this is comming

[q_e_t]

A Ponzi scheme is one designed explicitly to profit a very few and is deliberately fraudulent, with its mechanisms hidden. Social Security does not seem to fit this definition.

Re: We all know this is comming

[Enigma2175]

I notice in both your examples (poor neighborhood vs. well-off) it was the teens/young adults that were the problem. Perhaps the problems you see with idleness are not caused by idleness at all, perhaps they are just a function of immaturity. I would not be lighting stuff on fire or blowing up mailboxes even if I had no job, because I am a reasonable person with an appropriate level of maturity. There is a huge cohort of people who don't have jobs (we call them "retired") and there isn't a huge problem with them blowing shit up or setting fires. Just because you see a correlation with idleness and antisocial behavior doesn't mean there is causation.

Re:We all know this is comming

[david_thornley]

What strikes me is people talking about Bitcoins being useful to send money to people in other countries.

Suppose I want to send a thousand dollars in euros to someone in Germany. I can have my bank send it to the German's bank. Alternatively, I can buy $1K worth of Bitcoin, transfer it to the German, and the German then converts the Bitcoin into euros. Considering that the first is just sending some information around, and the second requires three transactions deliberately designed to take serious computation and two currency conversions instead of one, it would seem that banks can transfer money internationally easier than Bitcoin users.

Re: We all know this is comming

[ChrisMaple]

Downtown L.A. has the tallest buildings in the area, and it's one of the slummiest places. Walking the streets at night is scary. You couldn't pay me enough to live there.

A higher concentration of people inescapably means a higher concentration of criminals.

Re: We all know this is comming

[ChrisMaple]

For example, a parent who raises a child well to be a productive member of society has made a valuable contribution to society in the process, yet we don't pay them for their contribution. Although the United States provides a tax deduction for dependents (not sure what other countries do), this does not measure the effort and skill to raise the child well.

The view of human life that underpins your comment is staggeringly corrupt.
People do not bear and raise children for the purpose of benefiting society, although there are plenty of vile politicians who think that the purpose of people is to benefit their country (i.e. to benefit those politicians.) People who deliberately have children do it because they think it will make their own lives better. People who raise their children well gain pride from helping their children to live properly and well.

Re: We all know this is comming

[ChrisMaple]

Social Security is a vote-buying scheme. That is never admitted, so S.S. is obviously deliberately fraudulent.

The long term inherent and unavoidable insolvency of S.S. was not a concern of its creators, who new that they'd be long gone when the bill came due. This is fully in the spirit of the evil John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run we are all dead”

Re: We all know this is comming

[Powercntrl]

I agree that people should want to be productive members of society. However, people aren't paid according to the contribution they make to society, but rather how the market values the goods and services they produce.

We're not talking about the momentary value of labor versus its perceived contribution to the betterment of society - this is about a hypothetical future economy where automation has simply eliminated the need for many jobs to be performed by humans. Throughout most of history, if your job had become obsolete due to progress, you'd simply re-train for something applicable to your skill set. That solution is only sustainable as long as jobs remain available in other fields which require similar skill sets. As an ever increasing number of jobs are eliminated due to automation, there will be proportionally greater competition over the few jobs which remain.

It's inevitable that some people simply won't be able to, or simply won't want to re-train for another job, just to fight tooth-and-nail against everyone else who is doing exactly the same thing. So, you give them a UBI and tell them "Thanks for playing Capitalism, better luck next time, here's your parting gift!" Meanwhile, you've got the people who own the robots, and those lucky enough to still have marketable skills, flaunting all the great stuff they're able to purchase. Please tell me that's not a recipe for disaster.

The reason capitalism has worked so well (nitpicking aside) is that perseverance is generally rewarded. Yes, there are plenty of examples of people who work hard and don't get paid well for it, and people who barely work and rake in the dough. But by and large, for most of western civilization, if you're willing to work - you'll find the means to support yourself. Take away that drive to succeed (because we're talking about this hypothetical future where jobs are scarce), and where does it leave your society?
 

Re: We all know this is comming

[zilym]

They won't be employed. That's the problem. The solution is Agenda 21 (depopulation).

UBI is a short term distraction. Agenda 21 is the final destination.

Re: We all know this is comming

[q_e_t]

The long term inherent and unavoidable insolvency of S.S. was not a concern of its creators;

Can you demonstrate that for all realistic values of funding and likely dependency ratios and longevity that it is unavoidably insolvent long-term and that the creators were likely to have known of any such condition, should it exist?

Re: We all know this is comming

[hai_Priesty]

Replying to undo wrong mod.

I do agree with you; that is also why in so many indigenous people in reserves in developed countries like Australia (where government gives them enough welfare to be akin to UBI) alchoholism, especially for the males, is off the chart.

They have all the free times in their hands, and boredom, combined with a generalized sense of demoralization, as everything they have was given to them, can be soul-destructive.

Wait and see

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the elite pay the underclass a basic income for nothing other than peaceful coexistence, or do they preemptively put down the inevitable rebellion against their intended genocide?

I could see it going either way, but I know which way I find more likely.

Re:Wait and see

[ichimunki]

The real question is why should the elite own the factories and machines that do all this production? It rests on centuries of labor, thought, and infrastructure that all of us (or our ancestors) contributed to (and that's not to mention that some of us have ancestors who productive capacities were literally stolen from them).

At least the companies that are largely automated that have public stock available, those shares should be paying heavy dividends, executives can be paid in stock options almost purely while the public are encouraged (or subsidized) to buy shares in mutual funds or ETFs and the like. And perhaps there could be tax consequences for extremely large companies that don't have public stock offerings and pay dividends. And limits as to how much stock in any given company the executives and board members thereof can own (as this gives them an outsized voting bloc).

Public ownership of company stocks normally leads to public having a say in how the company is run, but mutual funds and the like do tend to strip this right away. I mean, how do you vote your fractional share of the 1000 companies in your fund? That's worse than having a full time job. But perhaps having more democratic systems for mutual fund governance would suffice? After all, most index funds are largely automated already. So the real purpose of a fund manager would be to manage voting on behalf of investors. So, perhaps fund managers should be required to undergo a more democratic selection process?

I'm not merely trying to promote a "privatize social security" situation here, I'm looking for a radical shift in how we think about financial equity in society and how to best share it with the least amount of change to our current system. How about stop letting companies buy back their shares (to drive up the price by reducing supply)? How about getting rid of 401(k)s and letting employees choose their own investment situations, how about requiring employers to match 100% employee contributions to their own retirement accounts, up to some reasonable level (and not just with company stock)? How about removing the income caps on social security contributions (biggest scam ever)? How about taxing capital gains the same as regular income (encourage people to buy and hold outside of retirement accounts)? There are so many fixes for our current income inequality problems available that are perfectly sane that the only possible reason they haven't been enacted is that the government of the USA is totally corrupted by wealth. I mean, do the rich actually "work"? Hell, no. They own stuff and they run around telling other people to work. Most of them inherited so much stuff that they don't even have to be good managers of that wealth to stay rich, the system advantages them in so many ways it's not even funny. That's not a level playing field, it's a scam.

Re:Wait and see

[computational super]

On the other hand - in a world where robots can actually do _everything_, why would you need an income at all? Robots can plant food, raise crops, slaughter animals and turn them into hamburgers, build houses, weave textiles... if your basic needs can be met by food, clothing and shelter, and robots can run around providing everybody with all of those, what would you need money for? What could you even use money for? The bigger problem with a "robots do everything" future is that this planet can only sustain so many people, no matter how hard the robots work.

Re:Wait and see

[ichimunki]

In a world where everything is made by machine, you will need money to pay people for jobs that can only done by hand.

Re:Wait and see

[cascadingstylesheet]

Do the elite pay the underclass a basic income for nothing other than peaceful coexistence, or do they preemptively put down the inevitable rebellion against their intended genocide?

I could see it going either way, but I know which way I find more likely.

Good thing /. supports religion then!

'cause if everyone trashed religion and just loved lording their supposedly superior intelligence over everybody, it could turn out bad, huh?

Global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

We're headed to a dystopian future where robots run the planet and humans are useful for nothing more than battery-like heat sources to power the computer overlords.

Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Tony Isaac]

ATMs started coming out in the 1970s. People back them wondered what would become of all the teller jobs these machines would replace.

In the 90s it was automatic deposit of payroll that kept people from having to talk to a human at a bank.

Nowadays, it's been months since I set foot in a bank. I'd guess that's true for many slashdot readers. Still, the banking industry is employing more people, not less!

According to BLS, there are 8.4 million people employed in the US financial sector, and this is expected to go up by half a million in the next 10 years.

It seems the robot apocalypse isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[mentil]

there are 8.4 million people employed in the US financial sector, and this is expected to go up by half a million in the next 10 years.

Simple extrapolation. A bursting of an economic bubble, or simplification/reform of the tax code, could end many of those.

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Anonymous Coward]

Long, long, before already. International Business Machines (IBM), National Cash Registers (NCR), etc, have been making office machines for a long time. Office automation started to get momentum in the 19th century with type writers already.

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[ShanghaiBill]

Still, the banking industry is employing more people, not less!

This is known as Jevons Paradox, but it really isn't a paradox at all. If you owned a bank, or factory, and automation increased productivity so each worker produced twice as much profit, would you fire half of your workers, or would you hire more?

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Anonymous Coward]

Longer. The bank I used to work for had it's first mainframe computer installed in 1961.

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Anonymous Coward]

I depends - can I get customers for 100%+ more of my products?

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure! You might end up on the front page like [that bank with the stagecoach logo], but there are most certainly ways to increase sales. ;)

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[slickwillie]

Ask Wells Fargo how to do it.

Re:Banks have been automating since the ATM

[Enigma2175]

According to BLS [bls.gov], there are 8.4 million people employed in the US financial sector, and this is expected to go up by half a million in the next 10 years.

I believe you are reading that table wrong. It shows 7,979,500 jobs in "Financial Activities" in 2014, and estimates that there will be 8.4 million in 2024. In 2004 there were 8.1 million in that industry, so the number of jobs actually fell while the US population went from 293 million to 319 million, so a much smaller percentage of the population is working in that industry. Even with the projected rise in total jobs by 2024, it is projected to be an even smaller percentage of the population, all while doing a lot more than they did in the past. Banks used to only do deposit accounts and loans, they are now doing a lot more things with a smaller workforce than before (and making a lot more profits than they were in the past).

I don't think your example illustrates the point you were trying to make, in fact I think the statistics you provided show the opposite. You're not wrong on your specific point (teller jobs have actually increased since the introduction of the ATM, citation here: http://www.aei.org/publication... ) but the data you provided certainly didn't illustrate that. Although that seems like it might be changing, from the article I linked: "Indeed, according to the Labor Department, employment of tellers is projected to decline 8% over the next decade. "

One complex algorithm from obsolescence.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not talking about the bankers. Once sophisticated software can replace all the humans leeching from the system, the system will change for the better. Or we will all be slaves to the new AI bankers. I for one welcome our new banker overlords.

Nationalize Banks

[mentil]

In the US at least, banks are so deeply in bed with the government that they ought to just be nationalized. For the average person, they only use a bank to keep their money safe (insured by FDIC), process checks, get a car loan or mortgage, and maybe a certificate of deposit for people who like safe investments. Time-bomb mortgages were bought writ large by the government. When the banks were about to go under, the federal reserve handed them trillions of dollars. 'Quantitative easing' afterward involved giving them another $trillion. You want discretion with your accounts and who you transfer money to and from? Your bank happily gives all that info to the govt. already, and you need an SSN and background check to even open an account.

Sure, maybe the government shouldn't be doing investments with these nationalized banks, but arguably savings & loan banks shouldn't either. With Glas-Steagal repealed, bad investments are going to lead to banks being 'too big to fail' due to taking down savings accounts (FDIC insured) with them. I seem to recall some Nordic countries had trouble when their nationalized investment banks went tits up during the recession. Sure, the nationalized banks will become another pork-barrel jobs program that's slow and inefficient, but it'll disempower the banking elite which currently rule our country, and IMO that's worth it. Maybe some of the fees and debit card liability bullshit will go away as well.

Re:Nationalize Banks

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US at least, banks are so deeply in bed with the government that they ought to just be nationalized.

Sure. And the medical system is more than half funded by the government, and all of it is tightly coupled through the regulatory system, so that should be nationalized. And the auto companies are mostly a function of government, having relied on government on several occasions for support, so they should be nationalized too. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac constitute the lender of last resort for the millions of homeowners that wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain financing effectively establishing the clearing price for property debt so there's another whole industry that should just be nationalized. And higher education, being largely a function of government grants, subsidies and government backed debt should just be rolled into the rest of the education apparatus as another function of government.

This is pretty much how Greece and Venezuela function. Any thoughts on why the young of those nations that harbor even a little ambition evacuate at the first opportunity? Perhaps that sort of reprobate is why certain other nations maintained gulag systems...

Re: Nationalize Banks

[Anonymous Coward]

as someone who has worked for thr government and for a bank, this idea is not convincing. allowing terrible banks to go out of business is one of the most important things the us system does correctly. 2008 was not something we should repeat as a good example. obamas failure is not our guide star. govt banks that are full of corruption would never go out of business.. too much politics involved. imho banks should get smaller not bigger.. the worst thing you can have in finance is a monopoly that is in hed with the government

Re: Nationalize Banks

[Anonymous Coward]

>Thanks, Obama

*ahem* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program read the first line.

Re:Nationalize Banks

[ichimunki]

Frankly, no. With the people who currently hold a majority of the seats in Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House, the last thing I want is the federal government controlling a damn thing that matters to me. I mean, the President is a pathological lying narcissistic freak! The dysfunction among all these so-called conservatives is Off The Charts(tm) bad. They can't even repeal a health care law some of them say is the worst thing since slavery. The President actually goes on Twitter to bad mouth his own cabinet appointees. And I'm no fan of the Democrats either. Most of them are just as puke-worthy.

Re: Nationalize Banks

[david_thornley]

008 was not something we should repeat as a good example. obamas failure is not our guide star.

Here's a simple suggestion: look up when Obama was inaugurated before blaming anything in 2008 on him.

Leverage that GO playing AI

[Neo-Rio-101]

All one needs to do is leverage that GO playing AI to trade the financial forex and commodities markets.
Once it figures out how those markets routinely move - AND THEY WILL (because the "business model" that runs them simply doesn't change - evidenced by Wall Street millionaires), then all one has to do is keep a server running and exploit the market for millions at a time while it makes automated trades.

I'm not even talking about HFT trading. I'm talking about standard swing trading.
Of course the only possible downside to this is EVERYBODY having an AI that can do this, and then the system will likely come crashing down, or become as volatile as BitCoin - with the key difference that it will affect actual world economies.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[Anonymous Coward]

On average high frequency trading makes markets less volatile, not more. New information is incorporated into prices in milliseconds which makes the price more correct.

Re: Leverage that GO playing AI

[Anonymous Coward]

*makes the price more agreed upon.

Correct prices would be based on data. Actual prices are based on hope and how much cocaine the average banker has snorted that day.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh. Sure.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[Anonymous Coward]

The algorithm is: buy low, sell high. It's quite simple, but harder to stick to because the media and stock brokers all tell you to do the opposite.

Re: Leverage that GO playing AI

[Dog-Cow]

There is no such thing as an objectively-"correct" price for anything. There's no physical law which governs economics.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[tomtomtom]

Whilst this is true and is valuable, the service which was once provided by market-makers - provision of guaranteed liquidity in certain size, especially for smaller or less traded names - is rapidly declining into obsolescence (for reasons largely unrelated to HFT) and HFT is not a replacement for it. The negative impact of it not being there is likely to be felt more by small investors than large/institutional ones. Many markets - e.g. in fixed income - which once had at least some minimal trading activity supported by market makers are now effectively zero-volume markets/trade by appointment/etc as a result of post-financial crisis changes at the broker-dealers. In turn this limits the range of suitable investments and investment strategies for smaller investors and further entrenches the large institutional investors as it broadens the range of investments that they effectively have exclusive access to.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[Mitreya]

EVERYBODY having an AI that can do this

Once everyone has the same AI, it will still come down to connection speed
People who can build the closest to the stock market server will beat people who cannot afford a direct channel or have a direct connection that is further away.

I don't think we have to worry about having too much equality in the foreseeable future.

Re: Leverage that GO playing AI

[Procrasti]

> There is no such thing as an objectively-"correct" price for anything.

What we have instead is the market clearing price. Which no one can manipulate in a free market (per microeconomic definition, when certain conditions are met - perfect competition, perfect information, no externalities).

The price of something is the intersection of supply and demand. Individuals make value judgments subjectively. But the market clearing price in a free market is an objective outcome from these subjective valuations.

> There's no physical law which governs economics.

Indeed. Economics transcends physics in that the laws of physics could have been different (might be in alternative universes), but the results of free market microeconomics are in fact *mathematical* theorems.

These theorems apply whenever there are limited resources and agents must make mutually exclusive choices between them.

Re: Leverage that GO playing AI

[bravecanadian]

> There is no such thing as an objectively-"correct" price for anything.

What we have instead is the market clearing price. Which no one can manipulate in a free market (per microeconomic definition, when certain conditions are met - perfect competition, perfect information, no externalities).

The price of something is the intersection of supply and demand. Individuals make value judgments subjectively. But the market clearing price in a free market is an objective outcome from these subjective valuations.

> There's no physical law which governs economics.

Indeed. Economics transcends physics in that the laws of physics could have been different (might be in alternative universes), but the results of free market microeconomics are in fact *mathematical* theorems.

These theorems apply whenever there are limited resources and agents must make mutually exclusive choices between them.

Except that there is no such thing as a free market in reality, and the mathematical theories in economics fall apart in the face of actual human behaviour.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[jbengt]

The algorithm is: buy low, sell high. It's quite simple . . .

The much better algorithm is buy before it rises, sell before it drops. But that's even harder to stick to, since you need to be able to forecast the future.

However, my grandmother had an even better algorithm (from my perspective): Always Buy, Never Sell. And she kept that policy even through the great depression. Thanks, Grandma!

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[Neo-Rio-101]

The actual algorithm is to know what markets are - and what they repeatedly do - day in, day out.

A market has either found an area where the market thinks prices are reasonable, or it is going up to probe out a new high price before dropping down to probe out a new low price, and then returning to a new reasonable price that has taken into consideration everything it has learnt from it's journey to the extremes.... including where everybody has their orders.

Then the cycle simply repeats, although sometimes it flips a coin on whether it goes to check out higher prices or lower prices first.... but it needs to check them both out to see who wants to trade there before coming back to balanced value areas.

Re: Leverage that GO playing AI

[Procrasti]

> Except that there is no such thing as a free market in reality,

What we have are varying degrees of divergence from it.

As the mathematics prove, everybody is better off in a free market, so this suggests that we do everything in our power to move from our non free, real market, towards free market like at every possible opportunity.

(It's like the frictionless surface in physics, sometimes we need to use oil).

Either way, the market has a clearing price regardless of the market freeness.

Re:Leverage that GO playing AI

[toddestan]

That new information can mean the HFT's decide they are getting out of the market in a matter of milliseconds, evaporating liquidity and causing huge, sudden price swings. See the flash crash.

Bye Bye Middle Class...

[pipingguy]

... unless you're a plumber, electrician. I.e., any job that requires your physical presence and is not easy to automate.

"conduct research or brainstorm ideas"

Too many people doing this just creates chaos.

"workforce will more likely grow than shrink over the next 20 years"

Most people doing unrewarding, low-paid, make-work jobs precariously (since it'll be easy to replace anyone). Hire people or face big taxes.

"creates opportunities"

For a select few aided by automated systems.

Re:Bye Bye Middle Class...

[rtb61]

All infrastructure projects are very much labour intensive but I would hardly call it make work, to have the best roads, the best footpaths, the best public paths, the best railroad, the best highways, the best electrical grid, the best sewer system, the best fresh water systems, the best storm water systems, the best communications network, the best ports, the best airports and of course out into the future, the best space ports, the best star bases, the best Lunar colonies. When people can not see beyond their own greed, they can not see the need for anybody else to live, other than to serve them. There is a whole galaxy of things out their to achieve and for us to reach them, requires real work and real effort and it is best served by creating the best possible infrastructure to best serve humanity. Idiots who can not see beyond their own greed will be the death of us, unless we push them out of the way.

Re:Bye Bye Middle Class...

[hipp5]

... unless you're a plumber, electrician. I.e., any job that requires your physical presence and is not easy to automate.

I suspect even those could eventually be automated by changing the way we do buildings. Instead of having site-built homes that get renovated over time, homes might eventually be treated like cell phones. Build them in an automated factory, ship to site, and when they break or become obsolete remove them, recycle them, and replace them with a new factory-built module.

Re:Bye Bye Middle Class...

[Anonymous Coward]

When there's few jobs left, Ahmed and Ackbar will be lining up to learn a trade and do the job for 1/4 your salary, like anything else.

Re:Bye Bye Middle Class...

[Gilgaron]

Have you done any plumbing lately? Pex with some sharkbite connectors is on the level of Lego as far as difficulty. The (admittedly kind of weird sounding to me) newish way of wiring power to everything but using wifi to connect the switch to the light could make electrical pretty simple, too. Those jobs will continue to exist but the more dumbed down it gets the less it'll pay because you'll be paying for convenience rather than skill.

You're joking

[Anonymous Coward]

Within the upper echelons of many financial firms, there's a lot of soul searching...Privately, many confide to peers, consultants and sometimes journalists that they're worried about what will happen to their staffs...

I'm pretty sure the "upper echelons of financial firms" don't give a rat's ass about their staff, or anyone else for that matter.

Re:You're joking

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the "upper echelons of financial firms" don't give a rat's ass about their staff, or anyone else for that matter.

They don't need to care about anyone else, pure self interest will lead them to the same conclusions.

Most banks make a large proportion of their money by extracting cash from the middle or lower classes. Automation is now threatening the middle class prosperity, they see that process happening in their own companies and can extrapolate the trend to society as a whole.

Re: You're joking

[mnemotronic]

Within the upper echelons of many financial firms, there's a lot of soul searching...Privately, many confide to peers, consultants and sometimes journalists that they're worried about what will happen to their staffs...

I'm pretty sure the "upper echelons of financial firms" don't give a rat's ass about their staff, or anyone else for that matter.

Agreed. They care about their dicks and worry about Weinstein-spillover and obscene bonuses for fjnorking the dumbass worker class.

Re:You're joking

[computational super]

I'm pretty sure the "upper echelons of financial firms" don't give a rat's ass about their staff

Well, remember, you're only "upper echelon" anything if you have a lot of peons reporting to you. So in that respect, yes, they do.

Living hell incoming

[whyyisthissohard]

In this hypermateralistic society your primary value is your ability to do a job. There is nothing we really have in common except the things we consume, which require a certain salary. Our culture is nearly out of blood and what is left is congealing. Rehashed/appropriated/vacuous/distracting art, simplification/retardification of education, narrowing of pursuits, curtailing of creativity and innovation....we have nothing to live for outside our mortal needs of survival and reproduction. And those will soon fail with no spirit to guide us.

It's OKAY, as automation gathers force, YOU will have more time to do useless things and we will keep paying you, and OF COURSE we will hire your children to be even more useless than you are :-)

There is a gun pointed at your head. At your childrens' heads. And you are trying to convince yourself it's not there instead of fighting back.
This wasn't the first sign. But hopefully it will be the one you heed.

Re:Living hell incoming

[Dog-Cow]

What other value could someone have to society other than his ability to contribute? That there are entertainers of various sorts who make millions belies your implication that the value has to be a job in the conventional sense.

Re:Living hell incoming

[computational super]

simplification/retardification of education

Don't forget the contemptification of education, too. Djikstra observed that there was no Dutch translation for the English word "egghead" - a perjorative term for a smart person. Want to be internetally nuked from orbit? Say that you consider yourself a smart person on an internet forum. There's nobody more hated than "arrogant elitist snobs" in American culture, and as far as I can tell, that refers to anybody with any sort of education. Look how Slashdot reacts when somebody mentions computer science degrees. I'm reading TAOCP right now, which was written in the 60's, and I'm awestruck by how _advanced_ it is - Knuth assumes that you consider calculus and matrix multiplication a triviality, and that you can reason about them intuitively. But he's not trying to deliberately be confusing - it is readable, but you have to pay attention to it. He's just writing for a much more sophisticated audience than exists en masse today - an educated person from the 60's.

Re:Living hell incoming

[whyyisthissohard]

You are exactly the problem.

CONTRIBUTE TO WHAT?

I already mentioned culture didn't I?

Your mind is totally enslaved by the notion of money as the sole source of value.

seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

basic math and a graduate school, familiar pedigree

what more could you want

This is BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is how many tasks are going to be taken over in the next five years: less than five per cent.

Re:This is BS

[Dog-Cow]

Less then 5, more likely.

And the executive's jobs?

[locater16]

What about the executives jobs, what exactly do they do again that machines can't replace them too? I mean, it's not like a machine can't order machines to take over jobs.

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[LordWabbit2]

Erm, endless meetings, political maneuvering, backstabbing, that's pretty much what they do, oh and golf. Going to be a while before they can be replaced by a bot. My wife works at a major bank in my country, they are busy implementing "bots" to automate stuffs. I worked at another company and we rewrote their logistics system, the looks on some of the staffs face when we gave a demo and they realized we had automated their jobs away still bugs me to this day. My sister works for a major retailer and they have just finished the first phase of a project which will automate all the picking (loading trucks). But I hate to break it to you, that's what we do (programmers) we replace people with code. That's what we have been doing right from the start, I just think the pace is increasing and we are replacing more and more complex tasks with code. It's not new.

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the executives jobs, what exactly do they do again that machines can't replace them too?

They bear all that responsibility. When they drive the economy into the ground, they are the ones who have to shoulder the golden parachutes.

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[AmazingRuss]

Speak for yourself. I make games to entertain all the people the other programmers have made idle.

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[Gilgaron]

I was talking to a guy at work about an initiative to go paperless. "Think of all the time [his dept] will have to do [other things] when we don't have to review paperwork anymore!" The other things are processes that have plans in the pipe for optimization and automation already, so I think the best case scenario will be that the company allows attrition to take care of things after everything is put in place...

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[Githaron]

In some sense, even making games automates people away. You are entertaining people with those games. This is going to take some entertainer related jobs out of the market since those entertainers have to compete with video games.

Re:And the executive's jobs?

[LordWabbit2]

I suppose a lot would depend on how many people are replaced at a time, attrition is only economically feasible if you have something productive for the person to do, having people sitting around twiddling their thumbs is really bad for morale. Otherwise it's mass retrenchments, which while also bad for morale is at least over quicker.

You mean this won't...

[Richard Mills]

You mean this won't just give humans more time to do the important Wall Street banker things, like snorting coke off of hookers?!

Re:You mean this won't...

[tsstahl]

You mean this won't just give humans more time to do the important Wall Street banker things, like snorting coke off of hookers?!

To be fair, great inroads have already been made to automate the hookers. I'll leave the reader to find their own link. ;)

Re:You mean this won't...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an exceptionally antiquated visual of wall street.

Modern wall street is a place where your phone calls are constantly monitored and every single word in every single email you send is scrutinized and analyzed and dissected for anything at all that could be slightly, remotely offensive to anyone. And then they ream you the fuck out for saying it and make you feel like the biggest piece of shit moron in the world. (In the industry, we call these "defects")

Any modern brokerage acting like the stereotype in this day and age, is probably a ponzi scam. There's just far too many lawyers involved now.

No fun allowed on wall street anymore, unfortunately.

Re:You mean this won't...

[computational super]

Now we just need to automate the coke-snorters and we'll be all set.

Re:You mean this won't...

[computational super]

I was about to respond "thanks, feminism", and then it occurred to me that there's an off chance that somebody could track this account back to my real identity, see that I once made an off-hand attempt to crack a joke about feminism, and fire me for being a non-true-believer so... yep, you're right.

Re:You mean this won't...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with feminism. It has to do with how many laws and regulations and government watchdogs and itchy lawyers with panicky clients who are pouring over every single square inch of financial law that they can use to squeeze back losses for their moron clients. Literally anything you say that causes a client to incur any kind of loss at all can be scrutinized to hell and back, and every democrat congressperson with an axe to grind can sic the SEC on you if you don't do absolutely every single thing by the book and to the T.

We spent the last ten years completely depersonalizing investing with feel-good laws and busybody government watchdog agencies. So no fucking shit that retail investing is all going to be done completely by computers soon and will become the most depersonalized experience on planet earth. Pretty soon, working with a broker will make calling Comcast seem like a fun experience in comparison.

Off Topic, but curious.

[EzInKy]

Why is there so much garbage in your post? There are a lot of characters with "^" above them and many instances of (TM) also in your text.

Re:Off Topic, but curious.

[Dog-Cow]

That's because the poster is an ignorant shit who doesn't preview, or doesn't care that he announces his ignorance and shitty-ness to the entire world.

Re:Off Topic, but curious.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fabled Unicode didn't make it aboard Noah's ark in time. Bubbles.

Re:Off Topic, but curious.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the first apostrophe was originally a giraffe, until it got one leg caught in Noah's landing gear.

Bank executives choosing people over profits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed they have a long history of being careful so as not to harm people for the sake of profit. If they didn't we might all have to bail them out some day, they wouldn't want that.

But what about preventing minimum wage increases?

[Shaix]

But but what will republicans now use as a reason to prevent minimum wage increases? Since companies are replacing employees with kiosks/robots/ai without any wage increases? Boggle

We won't need banks at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Blockchain makes banks irrelevant

Re:We won't need banks at all

[lucm]

Blockchain makes banks irrelevant

Sure, until someone finds a way to game the system and then everyone's fucked because it's decentralized. ex: ethereum

Shoveling money around ...

[Qbertino]

... is pretty much pointless in a post-scarcity economy.

That many bank jobs will go is blatantly obvious. Most bankers I see today could be replaced by some shell scripts and a speech recongizer.

A post scarcity economy, if done well, will simply have the long awaited 15 hour workweek.

Point in case: the biggest job I have incoming is 2 days per week as a coach for agile work and Scrum. Not even a Scrum master but a coach for Scrum. Not coding and no Dev ops. And that job is enough for decent pay that others would'be be glad to have for a full-time job.

Other stable jobs around me in my social circle include therapist and dance teacher ( with some coding on the side).

Long story short: We are already moving into a post scarcity economy in quite a few areas, and there are only so many bullshit jobs to go around.

Re:Shoveling money around ...

[Dog-Cow]

In two or three million years, when humans have a post-scarcity economy, we can worry about bankers.

Likely that't not their fear

[Anonymous Coward]

Their fear isn't what is going to happen when they have to fire their rank and file.

The real fear is what happens when the american public opens their eyes to this farce when they no longer can get any jobs and start rioting against the bankers and system

I like the comment about more time to "conduct research or brainstorm ideas" Yeah, on your own time, at home, while you're collecting unemployment and job searching.

Re:Likely that't not their fear

[Anonymous Coward]

If the rabble riots, it will be napalm-bombed. In this day and age revolutions are impossible. If you're not in the 1% you might as well kill yourself now.

Re:Likely that't not their fear

[AmazingRuss]

It will be blamed on the immigrants.

"what will happen to their staffs" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

The noun 'staff' never has an 's' added to it. More Slashdot illiteracy.

Re:"what will happen to their staffs" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Fail:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/staff

"noun, plural staffs for 1–5, 9; staves [steyvz] (Show IPA) or staffs for 6–8, 10, 11."

"1. a group of persons, as employees, charged with carrying out the work of an establishment or executing some undertaking."

Alas, you tried to be a grammar nazi but ended up just being a poseur.

Aging Tyrannosaurus

[Sqreater]

If he truly believes that the tech will increase jobs at his company, then this comment, in conjunction with his anti- Bitcoin nonsense, shows him to be a finance industry dinosaur.

This has already begun

[houghi]

How often do you go to a bank, compared to before the Internet? The last time I went I needed to go because I opened an account and it was required they knew I was alive and present in person. At another bank I do everything online.

Most of the things that might need a human interaction can be done over the phone. The people on the phone can do more people AND are cheaper, even if their wage would be the same as a person that you visit.

And many of the things that need to be done over the phone can be automated. There are now still people who do not have a PC or do not know how to use one. They are latterly dying out. From guestimated experience it is people who are born before around 1955. Yes, there are many exceptions on both sides of that date.

There are several banks in Europe that are only online. No brick and mortar. I even have an account in a different country. (No, I am not rich enough to dodge taxes).

Re:This has already begun

[tsqr]

How often do you go to a bank, compared to before the Internet? The last time I went I needed to go because I opened an account and it was required they knew I was alive and present in person. At another bank I do everything online.

Most of the things that might need a human interaction can be done over the phone. The people on the phone can do more people AND are cheaper, even if their wage would be the same as a person that you visit.

And many of the things that need to be done over the phone can be automated. There are now still people who do not have a PC or do not know how to use one. They are latterly dying out. From guestimated experience it is people who are born before around 1955. Yes, there are many exceptions on both sides of that date.

There are several banks in Europe that are only online. No brick and mortar. I even have an account in a different country. (No, I am not rich enough to dodge taxes).

I don't think a person's use or non-use of brick and mortar bank services has much to do with their computer comfort level. I usually go the bank once a week, to withdraw cash from the drive-through ATM; it takes about a minute because I do it on my way to work in the morning. Two or three times a year I actually go into the bank, to exchange coins for currency; sometimes this can take as long as 15 minutes. These minor inconveniences are the by-products of preferring not to live an entirely cashless life, and only take about 1-1/2 hours per year of my time. My wife, on the other hand, does almost all of her banking on line. I'm pretty sure she spends a lot more than 1-1/2 hours per year just swearing at her computer.

s/Fearing/Celebrating/

[Anonymous Coward]

Bankers don't "fear" job cuts. Corporate gain trumps public gain for them and bolsters their bottom line, increasing their standing as opposed to the working class trash.

At least 10% workforce reduction for one finance c

[Hadlock]

I used to work for a major regional finance company in their IT department, after almost three years there I finally made it down to one of the processing floors. What a disaster, something like 200 people on this floor, all overweight "lifers" with at least 18" deep of nick-knacks on their desk, they did... something? One lady I helped, every 10th check did not have the company logo on it. Her job was to print checks for brokers. Somehow the 20 programmers up on the IT floor hadn't gotten around to automating her job yet. The other 199 people on this floor had similarly mind-numbing jobs that were likely 2-10 lines of scripting away from being automated away. I suspect as these people get hit by busses and/or die of clogged arteries, their jobs will be automated. But 200 jobs is roughly 10% of that company, an entire floor of a skyscraper, poof, gone. They'll likely be out-competed by a much smaller company that can do the same services for a quarter of the cost and 6x the uptime before the last of those lifers retires.

If no one has a job

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will be buying the products and services the robots are providing?

Re:If no one has a job

[Dripdry]

The mega-rich. This is a burgeoning segment.

I'm in personal finance, and I'll tell you something: These people spend like drunken sailors. It is its own economy. It won't be a healthy economy, but it's an economy.

It's not a big conspiracy. It's that capitalism pushes as many people as possible into positions where they have no choices. Their meager wages will be spent on services, like the factory towns which used to use chattle (?). People egot paid in this stuff, but it had to be used to just subsist. By pressing everyone into that position... I don't know what people like the Koch brothers are thinking. That's their goal. I've heard some theories, one being that the rich very much believe they are superior to all other people and should breed themselves into a new an shining race of humanity, leaving the masses behind. That's an idea that's been around pretty much forever. They have no empathy because they KNOW (for a fact, in their mind) that they're better.
OR they believe they don't have enough. It's what got them into their position in the first place. I've met rich people who came from poor backgrounds, and they're terrified to death they'll never have enough. Like eating and eating and eating but never becoming full, they will lie, kill, cheat, and steal their way until they die, never satisfied.
Still others do it due to culture, or religion, feeling that they are Jews/Armenians/Japanese/Chinese/Poles/Greeks/Indians/Americans/Christians/whatever and have a culture of abuse/consumption to fulfill; they have a birthright.

Tangent, yes. However, I suspect things will get A LOT worse before they get better. It will take bloodshed to begin fixing this, because the world still only seems to understand violence, instead of enlightened reason and sometimes not getting what we want.

Bye bye spreadsheet monkeys

[plopez]

If all your job amounts to is running numbers through spreadsheets you're toast. Bye bye data analysts (aka "Statisticians in drag") it's been good knowing you.

Shit sandwich

[DaMattster]

It's really annoying when corporate people try to feed me a shit sandwich and then tell me it's nutritious. I hope that the same thing happens to rank and file employees that happened to factory workers. That may force America to wake up from it's stupid slumber.

Wasn't there an article??

[TheCastro1689]

I'm pretty sure I read about leaders of companies already being able to automate most positions, but they needed to be able to hire future leaders/managers/ceos so they had to keep lower positions around to train, evaluate and mentor people into higher company positions.

Once the elite levels are affected, they worry

[ErichTheRed]

I live near New York City. NYC, London and maybe Hong Kong are the investment banking capitals of the world, and there are billions floating around because of it. Banks don't worry when their rank and file employees don't have jobs anymore due to automation, but that changes a lot when we start talking about the elite ranks.

For those who don't know, an associate job at an investment bank is an extremely common congratulatory gift for graduating from Ivy League and other elite schools' MBA programs. It's a closed club because the jobs (for new grads with zero work experience) start at a crazy six-figure salary and have bonus potential going way beyond that. The banks work the associates to the bone doing what basically amounts to number crunching in Excel and preparing pitch books for potential investors. If you live through this without getting fired, you will never worry about money again in your life once you graduate to the management and director/partner ranks. These are guys in their late 20s who own several cars, a condo in Manhattan and a Hamptons beach mansion...the amount of money floating around investment banking is unimaginable to regular humans.

If the elite don't have a place to put their kids after they get out of MBA school that gives them the same standard of living they have, you can bet they'll be privately worried, but they also have to publicly cheer for the automation of work because it's great for their clients. I hope we figure out the right balance, because otherwise someone is going to suggest killing off anyone who doesn't get over 120 on an IQ test, and that's not going to end well.

Re:Once the elite levels are affected, they worry

[Gilgaron]

Part of the dystopia in 1984 was the constant war to use up the excess in production. Too many people ready to revolt is an easy target for some jingoism and you send them off to the meat grinder while putting their peers into make-work jobs putting together tanks. The future of warfare meant to win will be in drones, though, so maybe after one of the hegemons wins the drone wars they'll have to go Brave New World to fix the issue, instead.

Re:Once the elite levels are affected, they worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Constant war ? In the US, we're already there. Afghanistan has been 15 years already, Iraq 14, and neither shows any signs of ending.

Re:Once the elite levels are affected, they worry

[Gilgaron]

Sort of! Not much of a materiel sink or population curb, though. Just good for jingoism.

Re:Once the elite levels are affected, they worry

[rgbscan]

Check out the short staory "Manna" by Marshall Brain. It pretty much takes this scenario to it's endgame. It's a free online publication: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re:At least 10% workforce reduction for one financ

[ErichTheRed]

This is the biggest problem. It's not just the "lifers," it's what we're going to do with the pipeline of college-educated new graduates. I've mentioned this before, but colleges are graduating millions of students with a generic "management" degree or something similarly vague. The previous social contract was that large companies would take these new grads and find...something...for them to do. I see this a lot working in IT for large companies. If we have nothing to do for all these new grads, and all the lifers you're talking about...then the consumption cycle is going to grind to a halt.

Those lifers you're talking about are part of the cycle too. I'm sure the person with all the knicknacks on her desk has a family, probably owns a house, pays taxes, buys things, and once in a while takes a vacation to get away from their mind-numbing job. Back around 2000, I worked for a large life insurance company in NYC, who had a headquarters that spanned 2 Manhattan city blocks and several offices around the country. It was eerily empty even back then, and some of the old timers in IT told me that they had done a huge purge through the 90s dumping thousands of the workers you're talking about. According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.

I know it's not the best solution, but I think there has to be some sort of make-work policy for everyone. We're not set up for a world that doesn't revolve around the work, earn, consume cycle and having an employer of last resort could be the best way to stop a revolution from happening.

In my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Bankers are some of the dumbest people on Earth. They are the type of people that call the Help Desk because their computer won't turn on and demand that someone come out to their branch to check the machine refusing to look to see if the power cord is plugged in. Cleaning crews in branches are notorious for unplugging anything with reckless abandon. Working for a bank, even in the corporate headquarters, resulted in me losing all respect for banks. Then again, it was HSBC which was and still is notorious for bribery and kickbacks.

Next up

[easyTree]

Banker considers tuna sandwich or halloumi salad for lunch.

Pfft... Nobody can predict the outcome, really....

[King_TJ]

"It all depends on who owns the land..." ??!

How so, when the powers that be could simply declare control over the land and seize it from private hands, just like they seize drug money today in a bust?

The *real* trick is not to let government succeed in dividing the people against themselves, IMO. Right now, we've got all of this division -- from movements like BLM creating lines based on race to people fighting the "pro gun control" vs. "freedom to own and carry guns" debate, to division based on gay/LGBT rights, to the "everyone else vs the 1%" battles. Don't forget the Republican vs. Democrat political fighting escalated to new heights, where long time friends are declaring themselves enemies with each other simply based on who voted which direction in the last election.

As long as the population feels that we're all "in this thing together" -- we still have a shot at enforcing government that's "by the people, for the people". Once there's not enough citizens on the same page, we're screwed.

re: mega-rich

[King_TJ]

I'm not sure I totally agree with you here, though I follow.....

I certainly can't speak for what the true motives of the Koch brothers really are. But as a very general thing, I can still appreciate the fact that free market Capitalism is the best motivator we've ever had to get people to do work/accomplish things. Without it in place, the only alternatives we've seen in ANY other form of government are letting a few at the top dictate who is distributed what, completely subjectively. Thanks to the fact that greed is a known human emotion, this inevitably ends very badly for everyone who isn't on top, calling the shots.

In most successful nations today, there's at least a black market of free market Capitalism going on underneath the Communist or Socialist infrastructure. This is VERY much the case in countries like China, where "anything goes, as long as you don't speak ill of the people in power and don't happen to do something they happen to disapprove of at that moment in time".

Bloodshed tends to force a "reset" of whatever the norm was in a nation -- but it doesn't truly fix anything.

IMO, some of the super wealthy DO have various mental illnesses or psychopathic tendencies. That doesn't really mean anything in the big picture though, except for the fact that some of those distorted outlooks on life happen to "hyper motivate" them beyond the motivation MOST people get from earning money/wealth.

Eventually, technology seems to be headed towards giving us a world where all the human "work" just isn't necessary anymore. THAT obsoletes Capitalism since machines and robots don't require motivation to do labor. They just do it by design. I think any real/worthwhile revolution will only come about when this is truly a reality AND you have to force a total re-think of how the wealth will be distributed, when it's not actually earned by people anymore. In the (probably lengthy) transition period that has to happen to get there, my fear is that people will overreact and try to push an anti-technology agenda, wanting things to go back to how they were before as the answer. That would be unsuccessfully trying to "put a genie back into the bottle" and will cause unending suffering and strife UNTIL they give up that plan. (If the tech exists to perform labor without using people, someone out there will do it, one way or another, and control the majority of wealth in the process, while everyone else fights about those advances in tech.)

In the short term at least? This is much more about people disliking getting pushed out of their comfort zones than a real disaster in the making. There's PLENTY that can be done, including more folks coming up with new ideas for things others would pay for. Instead of sitting at that desk job every day where you collect your fat paycheck for doing a few boring, repetitive tasks? How about you pursue something you truly love and try to monetize it? Even in a world where everything is done by machine or robot? Art will still flourish. Art will probably only INCREASE in value as this happens because the whole point of it will be displaying what human hands and a human mind came up with. Used to be a truck driver and upset that self driving vehicles made you lose your job? Ok, fine. Don't sit there and tell me you have no valuable skills at ALL besides knowing how to drive a truck around! Most truckers I know did other things before starting that career anyway. Heck, as a professional driver, you probably saw more of the country than most people ever get to see in a lifetime. THAT has to have some value, right? Think outside the box a bit and leverage what you know a new way.

Don't worry, be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Bankers should not be worried. Replace the bankers themselves with robots. Then they can spend ALL their time bribing government officials.

well it's

[Anonymous Coward]

kind of ironic because ai \ robots will be able to do buy\sell transactions better than ahuman soon so it wont just be desk clerk jobs that go either but trader desk jobs to,

And We Have an Idiot For President

[JimSadler]

Yes job displacement will only accelerate and millions will no longer work in our society. So just how could we make it worse? First denial is everything. By using denial we can build a catastrophic disaster out of a fairly simple problem. We must change our entire economic and belief systems to assure that the jobless do not suffer or regret the changes. One choice is planing and action. The other choice is not to believe it and get to the point at which all hell breaks out. considering the nature of the right wing in America you can bet that no progress will be made and all hell will be upon us.

Re:And We Have an Idiot For President

[Anonymous Coward]

Definition of planing :having or being a hull designed to lift partially from the water's surface at high speeds

        planing boats

Re:And We Have an Idiot For President

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can just blame the natives and explain how they've always been savages anyways.

Re:And We Have an Idiot For President

[ChrisMaple]

Surfing. Problems all around and that dude wants to catch a wave.

Re:Pfft... Nobody can predict the outcome, really.

[rajafarian]

The *real* trick is not to let government succeed in dividing the people against themselves.

I think more like "the trick is to not let the oligarchs use the government to divide the people." But yeah, I think you're right.

Re:Pfft... Nobody can predict the outcome, really.

[rbrander]

You write as if this were entirely about your hyperventilated political polarization about *every issue* that has to be seen through an American lens.

The issue is global, just FYI. Your nutball belief that BLM is tearing apart a country of 350 million people, (half of whom vote and 60% of whom don't watch enough news to recall what BLM is about) will have no effect on whether a lot of really good banking jobs will disappear in the City of London or on the Tokyo Exchange. It will have less effect on whether automated manufacturing will throw 100 million Chinese back into rural poverty or not, after a generation of having had the taste of an industrial job.

These issues are very large and will shake nations and cause rumours of war, whether 12% of America remains quiet and submissive about police violence against people of their skin shade, or wave some signs in the streets about it...that being a comparatively small issue.

The real world is bigger than the one you see in American news media that have tailored their coverage to your local interests about American ethnic conflicts.

Re:But what about preventing minimum wage increase

[Whibla]

I'd say the solution would be for them to push for the introduction of UBI, and at the same time (since everyone now has enough money to feed, house and clothe themselves) push for elimination of minimum wage.

Pros: Every citizen now has his or her basic needs met; Any job 'worth' doing becomes economically viable; Any citizen is free to start their own business without fear of not being able to eat, etc.; Unskilled immigration becomes considerably less attractive.

Cons: ...um... you're all going to have to fill this bit in depending on your politics*

*Republicans (Conservatives) are very very unlikely to even consider UBI. Democrats (Labour / Liberals) will not consider abolishing the minimum wage. Neither part can work in isolation.

Conclusion: Unless political opponents can back off from their extremes, can the insults and mudslinging, and actually start to engage in civil debate we're basically fucked.

Re:At least 10% workforce reduction for one financ

[Baron_Yam]

>According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.

Ahh... FlexTime. That brings back memories.

It didn't take them long to figure out that this reduced efficiency because people weren't all on the same shift schedule. Don't forget, whatever the 'stagger' is gets doubled because not only does employee B show up an hour after employee A, but employee A leaves an hour before employee B. That's 25% of a standard work day where they can't communicate.

It turns out that - from the company's perspective - it's a lot more efficient just to demand people be in on time and let them worry about how long they need to queue to do it.

I think the real problem is parasites

[rsilvergun]

and rent seeking. We've already got the ruling elite skimming 50% off the economy before anybody else sees a dime. If we keep expanding that number something's got to give. That's what got us WWII last time.

Plumber & Electrician aren't safe

[rsilvergun]

If nobody has any money to hire one. As poverty becomes the norm you'll just live without plumbing and electricity unless you one of the ruling elite. To coin a phrase, Shit runs downhill.

Bankers Publicly Embracing Robots

[ChrisMaple]

Robosexuals?

I'm not happy about a future with robot pride parades and pressure groups demanding research into Robot Intellideficiency Virus.

Re:At least 10% workforce reduction for one financ

[Hadlock]

Yeah some of our top guys rolled in around 4:30-5:00am local time, about two hours before the markets opened in New York, their primary purpose in life was to detect problems early, and be available if (when) things went horribly wrong. Luckily our operations were pretty smooth and practiced and we had no internal surprises, but there is always some cowboy in operations that doesn't feel the need to test their "small change" which takes down transmissions for the first half of monday.
 
Anyways, those guys that roleld in at 4:30am, were out the door by 2pm. Getting a meeting room at short notice between 8:30am-11:30am was virtually impossible because you had to book those guys in most of your meetings to get anything done or approved. On the plus side the office was deadly quiet after 4pm and 4-6:30 was when I got 99% of my work done.