'Reskilling Revolution Needed for the Millions of Jobs at Risk Due To Technological Disruption' (weforum.org)

A new report, published by The World Economic Forum on Monday estimates that 1.4 million U.S. jobs will be hit by automation between now and 2026. Of those, 57 percent belong to women. Without re-education, 16 percent of affected workers will have no job prospects, the study finds. A further 25 percent would have one to three job options. The report adds The positive finding from the report is that with adequate reskilling, 95% of the most immediately at-risk workers would find good-quality, higher-wage work in growing job families. Report highlights the urgent need for a massive reskilling programme, safety nets to support workers while they reskill, and support with job-matching.

Comments

Reskilling is a horrible word

[Billy the Mountain]

I liked retraining better.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[JaredOfEuropa]

I read this as res-killing, i.e. killing a player in a multiplayer game right after they resurrect following a previous death. So yeah, not a useful alternative for retraining.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[SirGarlon]

That's a pretty accurate description of what the labor market is doing to some people. A filing clerk gets displaced by automation and retrains to a higher-skilled service job, like ... librarian. Then reasonable Web searches come along, and the demand for reference assistance dries up overnight. Just one example of a career res-kill.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[mark-t]

Still, using reskilling as a verb in this context is probably the wrong term. Under the usual conversion rules (coloquially called "verbification") "skilling" would not ordinarily suggest that one is providing someone else with new skills as much it would imply that one is (probably very effectively) utilizing skills they already have.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[DickBreath]

Res-Killing:
There was a guy who worked in the coal mine. Then the coal mine closed down.
So he got a job working on an automobile assembly line. Then his job was taken by a robot.
So he got a job driving trucks. Because those trucks aren't going to drive themselves!

(and if they do, I hear that we're going to bring back clean coal.)

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ceoyoyo]

Yes... I suspect the "reskilling" revolution will be actually looking ahead. There's no point in retraining people to do work that is just going to be in the next wave (or the one after that) of jobs that are automated.

The revolution will be telling people to go do something they like doing and not worry about whether some corp will pay you to sit in an office for eight to ten hours a day.

Re: Reskilling is a horrible word

[ArmoredDragon]

I can't speak for every industry, but I've not yet run into a bean counter that doesn't see the value in spending to train IT staff. Every time a CxO sees some shiny new tech product they want, it's always less risky and almost always cheaper to simply train existing IT staff to operate it, rather than looking for a new one. Especially true when the bean counter himself needs something new and shiny.

Health care is similar to this, and it's somewhat common for them to pay for entire college degree programs in exchange for a work contact. (I.e. you can't quit for x number of years.)

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ShanghaiBill]

like ... librarian. Then reasonable Web searches come along, and the demand for reference assistance dries up overnight.

Except that according to the BLS jobs for librarians haven't fallen, and are expected to grow by 10% over the next decade, faster than the general labor market.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[uncqual]

The revolution will be telling people to go do something they like doing and not worry about whether some corp will pay you to sit in an office for eight to ten hours a day.

Everyone can already do that. However, it turns out, there are a couple things most people like to do/have: eat and have shelter. To do/have those things most people find that working is what allows them to do/have these things. Most people choose to work rather than forgo food and shelter. Most people balance their time - some spent in work (which the vast majority of unskilled people don't really like to do) and some spent on things they like to do (drinking, smoking pot, playing video games, eating, having sex, browsing Facebook...).

If people did ONLY what they liked, who would hang drywall or make drywall? Who would pick up garbage? Who would clean and repair sewage pumps at the treatment plant? Who would place and finish concrete? Who would clean toilets? Who would care for rude oldsters with dementia? Who would make or install wiring?

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ShanghaiBill]

According to TFA, 1.4 million workers will be displaced, which is less than 1% of the American labor force of 160M, and it will be spread out over ten years, so less than 0.1% per year. About 20% of workers, or 200 times this amount, change jobs every year.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[uncqual]

In exchange for a binding employment contract of substantial duration, employers would likely be more willing to train workers. But employees switch jobs freely so if you, as an employer, go to the expense of training someone in a non-proprietary skill the person is likely to take that skill (learned at your expense) and get a job at a competitor because they now have more skills.

If workers would accept (and the law didn't prevent them from from doing so) a contract that says something like: "I will work for you for three years and meet performance objectives, in exchange, you will train me -- if I leave before three years have elapsed or am fired for cause, I will repay you the cost of training", more employer training might occur.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ceoyoyo]

Someone I know posted a diagram of the feudal system on Facebook today. It shows food flowing down to the peasants from the aristocracy. That's exactly what the aristocracy likes the peasants to think... never mind that the only source of food is the farms that the peasants work.

I have another friend who's a lawyer. She was complaining about working long hours. I asked if her firm was in trouble and couldn't afford to hire more lawyers. Nah, we're swimming in money. Shortage of lawyers? Nah, lots of good unemployed ones. So why? The culture says that if you don't work ridiculous hours you're not a good lawyer, so everyone does it.

You're right, some people need to work so people can eat, have shelter, etc. At one time, when humanity existed on the edge, that number was equal to (sometimes exceeded) the population. It has been decreasing for a long time, and is currently surprisingly small. It looks to decrease dramatically in the future, as more automation takes over many of the few remaining critical jobs.

The vast majority of us in western nations do not work so we (or anybody else) can eat or have shelter. We work doing various things, a surprising number of which are completely unnecessary, in order to convince our lords to give us food and money.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ChatHuant]

But employees switch jobs freely so if you, as an employer, go to the expense of training someone in a non-proprietary skill the person is likely to take that skill (learned at your expense) and get a job at a competitor because they now have more skills.

So amortize the cost of training over the number of years in the contract. If an employee changes jobs before his contract ends, the new employer must pay you the remaining difference.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[uncqual]

That would be fine - if the new employer is willing to do so. However, if there's a fully trained person without the "overhang" cost, they will get the job and/or the applicant with the overhang would likely get a lower offer. If the old employer trained you in A, B, and C and the new employer only needed B and C they are unlikely to be willing to bother with some sort of repayment scheme. Also, the system you suggest has plenty of room for abuse.

Re: Reskilling is a horrible word

[mapkinase]

It is not time yet to remove the dash between the prefix and the root.

Re: Reskilling is a horrible word

[mad_ian]

For actual LIBRARIANS yes. However most other library staff have gone the way of cashier's due to self checkout and computerised cataloguing

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[LQ]

I read this as res-killing, i.e. killing a player in a multiplayer game right after they resurrect following a previous death. So yeah, not a useful alternative for retraining.

I think that used to be known as camping.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[thecatt]

If people did ONLY what they liked, who would hang drywall or make drywall? Who would pick up garbage? Who would clean and repair sewage pumps at the treatment plant? Who would place and finish concrete? Who would clean toilets? Who would care for rude oldsters with dementia? Who would make or install wiring?

Robots, of course. Haven't you been paying attention?

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[uncqual]

Oh... Those magical things that require no capital to build, no human labor or intellect to build or maintain, that can do every job including mining, fire-fighting (literally) when a fire starts in a robot factory, the demolition and reconstruction of structures damaged by fire or flood or terrorist attack or earthquake, ...

Since some of this sounds pretty much like robot procreation and self-awareness, humans will look back fondly at the days when many of them only had to worry about reporting to their jobs under the oversight of a corporate overlord. Fortunately, it won't happen in my lifetime.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[RespekMyAthorati]

We work doing various things, a surprising number of which are completely unnecessary, in order to convince our lords to give us food and money.

And why the hell would this custom, which has been the norm for at least 20,000 years, just suddenly disappear?

Because you want it to?

They still don't fucking get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.

After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.

A wave or two after that, there will be no humans who can do anything a machine can't do better and cheaper. Not engineers. Not artists. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Not you, either.

Nobody. Period.

"Jobs" are going to be OVER soon. Concentrating on putting people in different jobs ignores the main problem.

We better fucking come up with a better way to run things and a way to make the transition, or we're fucked.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Hizonner]

I think this is true.

Even today, nobody seems to be willing to face up to the idea that not everybody can be high-skilled, and the economy can't necessarily absorb that much high-skilled labor even if they could.

When machines are higher-than-high-skilled, human labor becomes more and more economically irrelevant.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[bettodavis]

Ironically cleaning toilets, moping floors, de-dusting offices and a lot of menial tasks are very hard to fully or cheaply automate.

And please, don't get all "Roomba!" on me, because what a Roomba can do is but a small fraction of what a passably good cleaning person can do.
Many manual yet specialized blue collar jobs are equally difficult to fully automate. That's why self driving trucks are seen as such a big deal, given the mass of people potentially impacted and because such occurrences are not that common.

Paper pushers on the other hand, are in quite more risk of being replaced by a slightly better document processor/generator.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're only fucked if simpletons do not evolve to accept the fact...

So we're fucked, you say?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

Of those, 57 percent belong to women.

Maybe some of these women will start to consider staying home to raise kids again like they use to do....

We didn't have quite the problem with youth we do today when we had a parent at home raising the kids, at least in the formative years.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[apoc.famine]

They're not suggesting to retrain toilet cleaners into robot repairmen. What they're suggesting is even dumber, because the jobs they want people to train for are also going away.

They're picking families of jobs, predicting the ebb and flow of jobs within that family, magically finding that they come out even, and saying thus reskilling is what we need.

As I noted below, they think that we're going to need less data entry people and more receptionists. Since they're both in the Office and Administrative family, we'll just reskill the data entry people into receptionists, thus solving the problem once and for all.

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[geekmux]

You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.

Whatever.. a good buddy of mine got tired of being a ditch digger, and after two years of hard work and studying (starting with the lowly A+ and busting ass up the food chain) he's now a senior storage engineer for a top ten company in the Fortune 500 making over 150k a year in the midwestern US.

You need to understand that from a mental capacity and motivation standpoint, your buddy represents 1% of the toilet-cleaning/ditch-digging/truck-driving force out there.

We're only fucked if simpletons do not evolve to accept the fact that most traditional work will be obsolete, and the idea that you must toil to earn your keep.

Toil doing what? In case you didn't notice, the only simpletons on Star Trek were dressed in red, represented about 1% of the space fleet, and were predictably made obsolete within about 45 seconds of appearing on screen.

The key, of course, will be a certain amount of population control for future generations along with finding creative mental and physical outlets.

A major city suffers a blackout for more than 24 hours, and we find hospital delivery rooms overflowing 9 months later. Good luck implementing population control when the unemployable masses have little to do all day but eat, fuck, and sleep. That creative mental and physical outlet has already been proven. At least until the Fuckitron 3000 shows it can do that better than a human too.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

While people (not just women, asshole) being able to stay home to spend more time with their kids would be a good outcome, there is of course zero "problem with youth" today.

People have been whining about "the problem with youth" at least since there have been written records, but it so happens that that's particularly stupid at the moment, assuming you live in any Western country.

"Youth" crime, like all crime, is down (multi decade trend that shows no sign of stopping). Teen pregnancy is down (ditto). Engagement in education is up. Fucking politeness is fashionable with young people. What the fuck do you want?

If there is any youth problem at all, it's a youth poverty problem, perhaps caused by concentration of wealth.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Freischutz]

You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.

After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.

A wave or two after that, there will be no humans who can do anything a machine can't do better and cheaper. Not engineers. Not artists. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Not you, either.

Nobody. Period.

"Jobs" are going to be OVER soon. Concentrating on putting people in different jobs ignores the main problem.

We better fucking come up with a better way to run things and a way to make the transition, or we're fucked.

To take a real world example, you may not be able to turn a coal miner into a robotics expert but you can re-train the coal miner to be a solar panel installer or wind turbine installer. The real urgency is to bring the coal miner's kids to a level of education that allows them to become robot repairmen. However, what the US is currently doing is promising the coal miners that the 19th century will come back, that the nation will go back to coal and oil, (cue flags, xenophobic rhetoric and patriotic music) which is stupid because wind and solar have been cheaper than coal for a while now and they are becoming cheaper than oil and gas which means solar and wind are in effect better choices for pure business reasons. Meanwhile Betsy DeVos is busy tearing the guts out of the public educations system in the name of libertarianism, objectivist philosophy and the private education industry so that public education can be replaced with a private system that leaves you with a worthless business degree, the mountain of debt you piled up to pay for it and fat bottom lines for the private education providers that sold it to you. The result will be generations of young people with huge student loan debts that can be milked for money by Wall Street, no markatable knowledge or skill and who would have been better off going to a community college and getting a degree in something useful (even if it isn't a spiffy business degree from some private college or big name Ivy League institution) and that's assuming there are any such community colleges left that haven't yet been eradicated by the likes of Betsy DeVos or some variation on Sam Brownback's 'Kansas Experiment'.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[kangsterizer]

wages will just go down. robots are certainly NOT free.
if a human does it CHEAPER than the human gets the job. the only difference is that humans now compete against robots (and they already do TODAY)

there are tasks where robot costs are LOWER than humans (chain assembly for ex) and other task where its not (janitorial task), that's mainly because one robot can assemble a million cars, but can't clean a million offices. you need a million robots for that.

not that this is great or anything

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[rhadc]

I don't believe this is true. There will certainly be disruption and the need to "reskill" or "retrain." And there will be some who have a hard time doing so. But the machines simply aren't going to replace certain types of work for a number of reasons.

(1) We prefer people doing some thing.
(2) Our needs and consumption desires change. We always want the next thing.
(3) By not being able to think like humans do, the machines aren't going to be able to address our needs. They can't deal with categorical dissonance, consciously experience and interpret sense data, relate on tough judgement call issues, define "good enough" criteria for making a choice in unprecedented circumstances, etc.

Which is why we need us.

Cheers

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ljw1004]

After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.

That's an insightful and thought-provoking comment.

I wonder about child-rearing. I don't think automation will replace that for at least 100 years. Currently we place a very low dollar value on looking after children (in the form of stay-at-home parents, nannies, teachers, child credit, child-care tax relief). In the future you point to, I wonder if that will change?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[hey!]

You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.

It's not clear to me this is true. Sure, there may be some janitors who literally cannot be trained for better jobs, but of the millions of people doing those kinds of jobs there's bound to be many who could be trained for something more challenging.

I don't think, however, retraining toilet cleaners is in the cards, for two reasons. First, there isn't a job "toilet cleaner"; it's a task glommed onto various low status jobs. It's unlikely we'll see that task automated because it's not a big, immediate head count win. Secondly, and more importantly, I don't think politicians care about people doing low status jobs to do anything for them if they lose their jobs.

Look at rural and small town census tracts after the Great Recession -- there was no "after the recession" for them, it's still on. Sure they get lip service, but if you think anyone is going to prioritize the interests of an out-of-work coal miner over a fracking billionaire, consider that these are also the places which are ravaged by the opioid crisis. There's lots of posturing on that issue too, but no action. Drug wholesalers, over the course of two years, shipped nine million pills to a single pharmacy in West Virginia serving a community of less than four hundred people, and no politicians have proposed anything to prevent things like that happening again.

59,000 people are killed in the US by the opioid crisis annually, the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every two weeks, but we must tread carefully lest we harm drug company profits. I submit to you that demonstrates the lower value we put on the lives of those people relative to the lives of bankers.

If we can't be bothered lift a finger to save their lives, why would we save their jobs?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

While people (not just women, asshole) being able to stay home to spend more time with their kids would be a good outcome

I bought this up, specifically for women since the article said 57% of those displaced would be women, and women ARE traditionally, the home keepers and the ones that raise the child while the other mate works. This isn't being an asshole, this is referring to 1000's of years of how it has been, with this both parent working things being a fairly recent trend.

I do believe our kids would be acting better and be more education driven, etc. if they had home supervision in the formative years. We do see problems today that we didn't see in significant numbers when I was coming up as a child.

Fucking politeness is fashionable with young people. What the fuck do you want?

Where in the world do you live that you see youth polite???

Civility and respect for elders, etc has gone out the (to quote you) fucking window....you rarely get a thank you, or a you're welcome response when you do say thank you.

I'm not shy about 4-letter words myself, however, there is a time and place for them, and in general company or public is not the place to use it, and it would be nice if more people could do more than 3-4 words without dropping the F-bomb in general conversation.

Again, I'm not shy about language, but sheesh....try to learn some other words to use in "polite" company and situations.

People have been whining about "the problem with youth" at least since there have been written records, but it so happens that that's particularly stupid at the moment, assuming you live in any Western country.

Of course every generation complains some about the one after them....BUT in this case, we're seeing some very radical and troubling things.

We see VERY unmotivated youth, not willing to get out and search and compete for a job. Thinking things have to be just right and the job "means something"....when did this become a thing? The entitlement of the latest generation is really amazing. And in the US, I'm just shocked to see how little they value the rights and values many generations before them fought and at times, died for...and they're so willing to throw it out the window...to not be independent, and be willing to give all power to the government to care for them.

I'm amazed at how many young folks are actually out there in the US, pushing not only for true socialism (as the the utopian vision they have) but for down right communism. And..their refusal to accept that there ARE opposing voices out there that aren't the group think, and not only don't want to hear opposing viewpoints, but want to prevent them from even being expressed in public forums.

Yes, there are some radical problems with many of the youth we have now, that hasn't been seen before, and it is having a negative country wide effect.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gweihir]

While said "toilet cleaner" has a pretty secure job, you are mostly right. I have some insight into the area of engineering and there the higher-to-highly qualified jobs will not go away. Same for some of the technicians. The thing is that machines have a snowflakes chance in hell understanding what a capable engineer does or having the flexibility of a technician that does custom installation jobs. There is nothing in true AI coming out way, absolutely nothing. But automation (weak AI) do a lot of jobs to a large degree. It does not need to fully replace people to kill the majority of jobs. An example are 10 Amazon workers replaced by one Amazon worker and 5 robots. The one worker supervises the robots and does the part of the job where the robots fail. And 9 workers are out of a job as a result. There are tons of situations where something similar will happen.

The ones threatened are, for example, coders that are not very good (the vast majority), engineers that are tied to a single product or that have not kept up with things, technicians that only do generic mass-jobs, etc. True, that will be something like 70-90% of all tech workers, but the rest does not only have secure jobs, they become _more_ valuable.

I do agree that for most people "jobs" will be over and that there is urgent need to find a way to both keep them fed and provide meaning in their lives or things will get ugly. The few that will continue to be needed will not be the model the majority can to follow. Up-skilling is not going to work this time, despite propaganda telling people otherwise.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Attila Dimedici]

You might want to look at history. Almost all of the jobs that were performed 500 years ago have been automated.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gweihir]

Actually, everybody is at risk. I agree that the "paper pushers" will suffer horribly and that is the first time this happens. Many jobs in the "paper pusher" class can already be automatized to a large degree and it keeps getting cheaper to do so. But keep in mind that an empty (or not built in the first place) office building does not need cleaners either.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gweihir]

Good summary. Now, "receptionist" is a job that will not go away, but it will not provide many jobs. The market is just exceptionally small and it has pretty steep requirements: Helpful, educated, pleasant manner and to look at, punctual and dependable. Most people cannot actually be receptionists.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[RightwingNutjob]

This is not true. There is no way that this statement can be true while there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US. There are even fewer ways it can be true when low-skill assembly work in China is all done by tens of millions of human beings. Those facts on the ground and the idea that human work is on its way out are mutually exclusive. The latter idea is not grounded in reality. It presupposes science-fiction levels of machine capability that just don't exist in real life. Not only do those machines not exist, they aren't even close to existing. Stop believing the hype and start understanding reality.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Dragonslicer]

We didn't have quite the problem with youth we do today when we had a parent at home raising the kids, at least in the formative years.

I dunno about that. After all, we did end up getting you.

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[peragrin]

Um bullshit. In the 60's we had roving bands of kids, breaking and entering causing mayham, and getting into trouble.

Heck one group tried to convince me it was okay to take anything as long as you intended to return it.

No going back to roving bands of gangs isn't a good idea. Gangs are slowly being driven out not by police but by ideas and new things to keep the kids off the street and from getting bored.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[HiThere]

If you want the women to work at home, you need to pay them for it in some way. Today even with two incomes most families are poorer than their parents were with one income. (And among "the lower classes" women always had to work outside the home to earn additional income.)

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[rally2xs]

You don't fucking get it.

Thanks to Trump, this is no longer a zero-sum game. The influx of new jobs due to economy growth and the return of factories from out-of-country (like the Chrysler plant announced last week which will be closed in Mexico and re-opened in Michigan with 2500 new Michigan jobs) is going to make this 1.4 million not-a-factor. Its way past time to relax and enjoy. So, relax and enjoy. The big-money globalists who want to ship our jobs to every other country on the planet besides the USA are no longer in control. Trump is, and prosperity will ensue.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gettin2old]

The low skilled jobs in China are also accompanied by very low wages. Maybe automation just isn't cost effective when you don't have to pay so much for low-skilled work.
The reality is as it always has been. Jobs that are repetitive and/or don't require skill will be eliminated through advancement as soon as it's cheaper to automate them.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

If you want the women to work at home, you need to pay them for it in some way. Today even with two incomes most families are poorer than their parents were with one income.

Well, a lot of the reason for that being "poorer", is today everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses.

My parents and most of my friends' parents, had to sacrifice things to have one income and make it...we didn't have a tv in every room, we didn't have the latest and greatest cars or anything else.

People need to go back and figure what's important and if you're going to have a family, be prepared to put your development and acquisition of earthly possessions and luxuries aside till the kids are out of the house.

It can be done, it WAS done for many, many many generations.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[swb]

I feel like most babies under a year could probably be taken care of by machines better than people, if only because the children have near zero communication ability besides crying, well known needs, and a robot would have infinite patience. Plus a robot could do all that Asian Tiger Mom shit like play Mozart and recite Shakespeare that most real parents can't be bothered to do.

It would start to be a problem later in life when the baby needed more human interaction for speech and language or emotional development, but honestly who knows, and I think we will find out in the next 50 years what children raised by a robot nanny will be like.

I'd go one step further and think that maybe even robot nannies would solve a lot of our endemic poverty problems because they could probably provide more & better stimulation and care than many impoverished parents can. We'd at least produce kids who weren't maltreated and ignored for the first 3 years of their life.

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[zlives]

you realize grease was a movie...

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ceoyoyo]

"we're fucked"

I suspect they're fucked. As in glorious revolution fucked.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ceoyoyo]

"I wonder about child-rearing. I don't think automation will replace that for at least 100 years."

Looking around, I think technology has already mostly replaced child rearing. The last step is replacing the adult who's mostly there to take the responsibility if anything bad happens. And frankly, it's not hard to see a day soon when a robot is more reliable in that capacity than today's typical daycare worker.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[apoc.famine]

While it's true that a lot of people aren't cut out to be receptionists, I think it's a moot point, given that one "finding" of the underlying report was that we'd need more of them! Thus allowing for the reskilling that you so accurately point out won't really work anyway.

Interestingly, they also noted that we'd need less personal assistance in the same job family, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that a lot of receptionists at a lot of places fill some of that role as well. The predictions they're making for the jobs we're going to both lose and need more of are rather baffling. That's outside of the entire fiction of reskilling, as you so rightly point out.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[HiThere]

Well, you lived up to your handle.

OTOH, it does appear to be true that unemployment is actually decreasing at the moment. I haven't yet seen an analysis of *which* jobs are increasing, and what percentage of the population is counted as "not part of the workforce because discouraged", so I don't know what that means.

OTOH, factories in China are being automated because it's cheaper than hiring workers. So far the Chinese government seems to be handling it, but there have been lots of predictions that their approaches will not continue to work.

So I would like to hear your justification as to why "This cannot be true", as a simple assertion doesn't seem very convincing. Complex situations are subject to rapid changes of state. E.g. one accident can jam an entire freeway. If, as predicted, self driving vehicles become a "real thing" in the next few years, that will put a very large number of people out of work, eventually all commercial drivers. And if the cost savings are as predicted, then eventually will probably be on the order of 10 years, in a distribution with a fast rise and a long tail. This will throw about 1/5 of the current work force out of work or at least needing drastic reskilling. Not just the drivers, but the cafe workers, etc. and the mechanics will need LOTS of retraining that will not be cheap...so most of them won't be able to afford it unless subsidized. And note that it wouldn't be cheaper to use automated vehicles if they needed much skilled maintenance. So that will only absorb a very small fraction.

And the above projection doesn't even consider the effects of more and more companies switching to short term contractors (hourly contractors?) to do the work. I was quite shocked to see that this included things like firms of lawyers, but apparently it does. Perhaps for some lawyers this is an advantage, but it strikes me as a "Star system" where some people will be rewarded excessively, and most will loose out totally, with a few in the middle. In this kind of a system the mode is abject failure, and the median is bare survival. It's one thing if the entertainment industry runs that way, but when most industries are run in that pattern, the mode is going to be "out of work".

So to me the estimate seems not only possible, but somewhere between plausible and probable. There are clearly ways around it, but the one's I'm aware of all would require an extensive restructuring of the economic system, and even then they would need lots of debugging.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[fluffernutter]

Sure it will change. No one will have money to pay people to look after their children and everyone will starve.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[swb]

Aren't we already at the point where most humans in the world aren't really worth their own consumption costs?

Why would we have billion plus humans who live in horrific poverty if they were somehow a real gold mine of economic productive ability?

Maybe it's just a question of whether or not they can be effectively put to use, but I'm kind of inclined to think that's not it, we're just overpopulated and the demand for labor isn't great enough.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[HiThere]

This shouldn't be ironic, but it is. That's because people tend to think that things that are difficult for people to do are hard, but things that are trivial to learn (if not perform) how to do are easy. But this is wrong.

People evolved to handle certain problems easily and automatically. Other problems we have very little in the way of an evolved skill set. So we tend to think of math as hard, and object recognition as easy. And we tend to think of things that our body has evolved to be able to do as easy. But this is wrong.

OTOH, our robots are also evolving. Roomba is a cheap generation 2 robot. It is almost missing in intelligence, and has a rather inflexible body. (Generation one robots are generally called numerically controlled tools.) We're in the early stages of generation 3 robots which are more flexible, if not great, and have rudimentary intelligence. Automated cars will be a mid-to-late generation 3 robot. More intelligent, though in that case not particularly flexible. There are other variations that are more flexible already, but the use-case isn't there to consider them cost-effective (except, possibly, for certain military applications, of which I know nothing). A decade from now though, should put us in the early stages of generation 4 robots, which will be both more intelligent and more flexible. The questions in my mind have to do with size and cost. If Moore's law is even approximately correct, then expect vast increases in intelligence, which means the ability to control things, at minor increase to actual decrease in cost.

Saying your Roomba can't do it, so a robot a decade hence won't be able to is about as silly as saying that because a gooney bird (DC3) can't do it, neither can a 747. That's not exact because a DC3 was a more advanced airplane than a Roomba is an advanced robot, but then I don't know what the robots a decade hence will be like. I'm pretty sure they won't be like Daneel Olivaw, though. That's generation 6 or 7...and presuming lots of advance on handling power.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ljw1004]

Looking around, I think technology has already mostly replaced child rearing. The last step is replacing the adult who's mostly there to take the responsibility if anything bad happens.

Could you say more? In what ways do you think technology has mostly replaced child rearing? My kids are aged 4, 2, 2, and I can't think of of much technology in their lives (save the oldest who gets 1/2 hour of iPad time every other day). I don't think their lives are much different now from when their mother and I were young 40 years ago.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Miamicanes]

Remodeling a bathroom to support this is harder than you'd think, mostly due to the code issues that arise with floor drains.

In most parts of America, the use of drum traps with floor drains is prohibited in new and remodel construction. Only P-traps are allowed. P-traps need ~20 inches of directly-accessible space below the drain. In some places, you MIGHT be allowed to put the trap a few feet away from the drain... but even then, you'll have an uphill battle with the building department getting it approved (it's frowned upon, even where legal).

As a practical matter, a second-floor floor drain has to sit above a first-floor closet (or at least, someplace where you can get away with dropping the ceiling by a foot to hide the plumbing for the bathroom above, but still access it directly through a hatch).

Could you rig something up with custom flattened plumbing or a pump that might technically work? Probably. Could you actually get anything like that officially approved by a building inspector? Good luck (you'll DEFINITELY need it).

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ceoyoyo]

I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop.

There's a baby in a carriage, sleeping. The mother or nanny is on her phone. That's not terribly different than the past, except for the phone.

A couple of kids in the 2-6 range, one of which is playing on a phone, the other on a tablet. Mom/nanny is on her phone.

A minivan just pulled up outside. I can't see how many kids are in the back, but I can see that it has a ceiling mounted DVD player.

I commend you on the way you're raising your kids. If I have kids I intend to do my best to do the same. But that doesn't seem to be the reality for most people. Television, educational toys, apps to help with homework, cell phones for entertaining and keeping tabs on kids, tracking bracelets, child rearing hasn't been overlooked by tech. And all those things are still pretty crude. It's easy to see how that might go further in the future: the Japanese are madly trying to develop elder care robots to get them out of their demographic crisis, but the same technology has long been envisioned by science fiction for raising children.

I suspect eventually we will come to our senses, spend a small amount of our time working and devote much of the rest to pursuits that we enjoy. One of the most popular may be raising kids. In the meantime, I suspect that people will continue to spend less time raising their kids and make up the increasing shortfall using technology.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ctilsie242]

Hepvo traps are up to building code these days, and can be placed both horizontally or vertically. The nice thing about these is the fact that they don't require water to keep the sewage gases at bay, so evaporation doesn't cause a disused bathroom to smell bad.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Deadstick]

A major city suffers a blackout for more than 24 hours, and we find hospital delivery rooms overflowing 9 months later.

Welcome to Snopes. May I interest you in a JATO-powered car?

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[ArmoredDragon]

"Well, a lot of the reason for that being "poorer", is today everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses."

No, it's not. Back then, the Joneses didn't have it either. You're confusing money and wealth, which are not the same. Wealth, by definition, is material goods. So if he has better stuff, then guess what? By definition he is wealthier.

Income doesn't tell you a whole lot about how wealthy somebody is. For example, $150k a year income in Phoenix provides a MASSIVE difference in purchasing power, and therefore wealth, than the same income in San Francisco.

But even if we take geographical location out of the equation, you still can't make reliably good guesses. For example, what about the guy with a gambling problem? What about the guy with the cocaine habit? What about the guy who decided to breed 9 kids? What about the guy who owes alimony and child support to three exes?

These things all decrease your wealth. That, and people who live paycheck to paycheck are simply living beyond their means. Whether that comes in the form of buying a car that you can't afford, renting or buying a house that you can't afford, or living in an area that you can't afford, it is those choices that make you struggle financially.

Those of us who don't struggle financially aren't necessarily rich, nor do we necessarily have a good income, rather we just choose to live below our means. Rather than buy a new car, I always buy salvage. Traditional wisdom says don't spend more than 38% of your income on rent, whereas I keep mine below 25%. Little things like that make all the difference in the world. And when you invest your savings, (stocks, college, whatever) you get even more income later. This is also what separates rich from poor.

And by the way, before my career started, I lived comfortably on part-time minimum wage by living in somebody's spare bedroom for $300 a month while driving a 20 year old Toyota. And yet I still had money left over to pay my tuition and buy ramen and $1 cheeseburgers. This was in 2008, by the way.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Gr8Apes]

Well, a lot of the reason for that being "poorer", is today everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses.

If you want to stop that nonsense, make credit more difficult to get. Do that by reducing the interest rate that is chargeable to a maximum of double the fed rate or 5%. Credit will dry up for anyone but the highest levels of credit worthiness.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ctilsie242]

There is a period of time where a child is adept at picking up languages. That might be a perfect time to teach a kid not just the local language, but at least 4-5 commonly spoken languages by a robotic teacher with a top notch accent, so kids have the ability to handle conversation globally. (Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi come to mind, but this can be discussed/argued endlessly.)

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[greythax]

Ironically cleaning toilets, moping floors, de-dusting offices and a lot of menial tasks are very hard to fully or cheaply automate.

Unfortunately you are describing the OLD kind of tech thinking. It is, as you say, super hard to engineer a robot and program it to clean as effectively as a human over a broad range of scenarios. Roombas represent a cheap version of that kind of thinking, not very effective, but good enough to sweep your floor.

However, that's not what we are talking about. We are in the process of a controlled deconstruction of that kind of automation. As computing power becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, we have given up trying to design the whole solution, and rather let the applications teach THEMSELVES how to effectively handle general tasks. You know, the same way you learned to clean a bathroom.

10 years ago, it was unthinkable that a car would be able to do more than "keep between the lanes". Now we are seriously considering letting them be our new taxi drivers. With the financial success of the cleaning robots we have today, you better dang sure assume that someone is working on a neural network that can handle doing your dishes. This year there were not one but TWO laundry folding robots on show. Don't think that is a big deal? You might want to look up how insanely hard it is to program a solution to a wadded up shirt. Every day we are surpassing milestones that would have seemed impossible the day before.

And as the GP suggested, after they are cleaning your house, they will be fixing your car, and then fixing the robots that fix your car. And eventually, writing your programs for you. Now, depending on how close to retirement you are, you might not care. But in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, "you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." We are all on the road to being replaced. We might want to consider how to deal with that prior to waking up and finding it has happened.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[jeff4747]

There is no way that this statement can be true while there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US.

When people are talking about the future, a defense based around "this is the way it is right now" is not terribly valid.

The discussion is what happens after several generations of general-purpose AI and automation. We haven't even had the first generation yet.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

Or maybe all the men could start staying home to raise kids?

Well, they keep saying men make more $$ than women, so...if that's true (and likely long ago it used to be), then wouldn't it be smarter to have the man work and the wife keep the home?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[serviscope_minor]

10 years ago, it was unthinkable that a car would be able to do more than "keep between the lanes"

It wasn't. People were working on self driving cars long before google made it fashionable. The first DARPA grand challenge was completed well over a decade ago.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

Women went to work because the household in which they were housewives wasn't sustainable on the husband's salary in around 1970s at least in the USA.

I grew up in the 70's and that simply is NOT true.

Most everyone I know grew up with their moms at home during formative years and didn't usually start working till kids were teens or near teens and could take care of themselves at home after school or during summers while both parents worked.

And even then, that was dual income not of necessity, but to have some nicer things.

But those early years...THOSE are the important ones to have a parent at home with kids, to read to them, stimulate their brains, give them some "home training"....

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[jeff4747]

Ironically cleaning toilets, moping floors, de-dusting offices and a lot of menial tasks are very hard to fully or cheaply automate.

There was a time before automatic dishwashers existed. Futurists predicted a machine with arms that washed dishes in a sink, and then dried them with a towel. Because that's how humans washed dishes.

Then automatic dishwashers were invented. Instead of arms over a sink, they are boxes under the counter. And our plates, cutlery and pans were all changed to work with these automatic dishwashers because the old ones could not survive the abrasive chemicals and high temperatures used in the dishwasher.

Automation does not have to fit the current environment. We will happily change our environment to fit automation.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[cayenne8]

Of those, 57 percent belong to women.

Maybe some of these women will start to consider staying home to raise kids again like they use to do....

We didn't have quite the problem with youth we do today when we had a parent at home raising the kids, at least in the formative years.

Ouch...!!!

The feminists are out in full force today....Troll for just saying what had been the norm until a couple decades or so ago....?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[RightwingNutjob]

Your last sentence makes my entire point. There is no reason to make any projections for the future that are predicated on a technology that does not exist, and in my opinion cannot exist as described.

Let's take something from up in this thread: driverless delivery vehicles. First of all they don't exist outside of a few publicity stunts. Second of all, even if they were all they were cracked up to be, a whole class of delivery jobs are protected from automation by virtue of not just being about driving. Long-haul hub-to-hub trucking might be more automated, but urban delivery requires human intervention as much as it requires driving. In fact, there might be more delivery jobs if the truck drives itself and several delivery guys sit in the back and do their thing when the truck stops. If it automates at all.

Factory assembly work: machines need to be reprogrammed to do different tasks. Assembly machines don't just need to be reprogrammed, they need to be redesigned and rebuilt to do different tasks. Humans don't. Humans win. That's why there will always be humans in the loop in any industry where designs change faster than assembly machines can keep up with them. Even electronics assembly. There aren't many through-hole connectors on most things anymore because surface mount stuff can be entirely automated, but occasionally you still need the sturdiness of a through-hole connector and a human is going to be the one to put it in, especially on lower-volume production runs.

ATMs have been around for decades and so has online banking, but most all banks still have physical branches and multiple tellers behind the window.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Gr8Apes]

This shouldn't be ironic, but it is. ...Saying your Roomba can't do it, so a robot a decade hence won't be able to is about as silly as ...

If you'd said 5 years, I would have taken you at your word. The progress on this level is accelerating visibly at the speeds seen for computers in the 90s. The capabilities become cheap enough to be common and you get an explosion of productivity. The end for many jobs will be jarringly sudden when their time comes.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Gr8Apes]

I feel like most babies under a year could probably be taken care of by machines better than people, if only because the children have near zero communication ability besides crying, well known needs, and a robot would have infinite patience. Plus a robot could do all that Asian Tiger Mom shit like play Mozart and recite Shakespeare that most real parents can't be bothered to do.

Slap a modern olfactory replica silicon representation of mom and dad on them, and they could bond with mom and dad also.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[greythax]

I'm sorry, let me correct that statement: 14 years ago, it was unthinkable that a car would be able to do more than "keep between the lanes", except for a bunch of graduate students who, after a year of trying, failed to secure a prize for automated driving through an open desert track with zero traffic.

For the record, I do remember when the Darpa Grand Challenge was announced for 2004, and the discussion here on slashdot, and the prevailing wisdom that winning the full prize was completely impossible because of the speed needed to get to the end in time.

I don't want to diminish the role of the grand challenges, but this was not in any way something that was being developed by the private sector until after the 2005 challenge. But either way, it was widely accepted until relatively recently that it would never be a thing, which was the point of my original statement.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gweihir]

Well, it is the first time that "paper pushers" will be hit large-scale. But yes, you are not wrong.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[gweihir]

Yes, their assumptions and predictions are baffling. Just like is somebody paid for their results and they created some fantasy narrative that arrives at that result, come to think of it.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Maxo-Texas]

actually, we had much worse problems 20-40 years ago.

And the cause wasn't really home child raising skills as much as lead in gasoline and paint.

After we removed the lead in gasoline and paint, a lot of criminal problems went away.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[ChatHuant]

...there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US.

The unemployment rate is not the best number to look at, IMO - the government keeps obfuscating it, by mischaracterizing people's situations to make itself look good; see how George Bush created thousands of manufacturing jobs overnight by declaring fast food workers to be manufacturers.
 
A better indicator is labor force participation rate. As you can see here, in the years after the war, the rate was somewhat above 50% (which matches the social situation at the time, with mostly men working, and many women staying at home). The sixties brought the large scale entry of women in the workplace, which pushed the labor force participation rate to the high 60%. However, after peaking in the nineties, the rate has been falling steadily over the last ten years, and is now halfway back to the situation in the fifties. This contradicts your argument.

There are no social changes I'm aware of that would explain this decline. I believe (but keep in mind I'm not an economist), the decline is largely due to an economic factor: the replacement of workers (at least in the USA) with cheaper alternatives.

At this time, the alternatives are outsourcing (made easy by globalization), and automation (made easier by advances in technology). They both apply pressure on wages. Outsourcing pushes for equalization of the income of USA (and first world) workers and the income of workers abroad. Automation pushes for equalization of the income of workers to the cost of machines. Outsourcing has a certain lowest threshold - it won't depress the wages of American workers below the wages of workers in the poorest other country. However, I don't believe automation has any such built in lower limit.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[jeff4747]

There is no reason to make any projections for the future that are predicated on a technology that does not exist

There is if you want to avoid suffering and bloodshed that will be involved if you don't.

Since humans evolved, work has equated survival. From hunting and gathering to today's paychecks, you survive because you work. When work disappears, we will break that construct. Redesigning our societies around a change that large is not a small undertaking. And if we don't start laying the groundwork before there are billions of starving people, there will be massive violence.

For example, Syria is in civil war because of famine. Desperate, hungry people turned to various radicals because they had money and thus food. Repeating that on a global scale would be a very bad thing.

Long-haul hub-to-hub trucking might be more automated, but urban delivery requires human intervention as much as it requires driving. In fact, there might be more delivery jobs if the truck drives itself and several delivery guys sit in the back and do their thing when the truck stops

At one point in time, people believed that automatic dishwashers would be a robot with arms mounted over your sink. The robot would pick up a plate, wash it in the sink, rinse it off, and dry it with a towel. Because that's how humans did dishes and any automation would do what the humans do, right?

Instead, we have boxes under our counters. And we completely changed how we make plates, cutlery and cookware to make those compatible with the box under the counter.

We will happily convert our way of doing things to fit automation instead of always requiring automation to fit the way we do things. Which means we would likely accept some sort of standardized delivery system that fits nicely with automation.

Factory assembly work: machines need to be reprogrammed to do different tasks. Assembly machines don't just need to be reprogrammed, they need to be redesigned and rebuilt to do different tasks. Humans don't. Humans win

Yep! That's why there are no robots in factories today......oh wait...

It turns out a machine that can do the job 24/7/365 and not have a pesky need for food and sleep wins over humans that do.

Also, we're postulating an environment where robots can build robots. So there's no need for humans to be involved in that redesign/rebuild.

ATMs have been around for decades and so has online banking, but most all banks still have physical branches and multiple tellers behind the window.

Actually, the number of bank tellers has plummeted. Also the number of bank branches has plummeted. But you are talking about an environment where people who would be bank tellers can get a different office-type job.

We're talking about an environment where that can't happen, because there are no other jobs to take. Why hire a human when a robot and/or general purpose AI is far more profitable?

Wait and see if that happens? That's a recipe for an awful and violent future where we suddenly have to change society, instead of a far more gradual transition.

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[mapkinase]

The answer has been given by Tommaso Campanella, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[serviscope_minor]

I'm sorry, let me correct that statement: 14 years ago, it was unthinkable that a car would be able to do more than "keep between the lanes", except for a bunch of graduate students who, after a year of trying, failed to secure a prize for automated driving through an open desert track with zero traffic.

Autonomus driving was not widely talked about nutil recently, but research has been going on for decades in both industry and academia. Dirt roads provide a whole lot of extra obstacles.

Meanwhile, even in the early 90s, there were fully autonomous cars which drove in real traffic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It might have been unthinkable to people outside the industry, but it wasn't to people in the industry (or in sci fi!).

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[akical0118]

Bank branches are closing in record numbers over the last 20 years, try again

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[sound vision]

We could mandate sterilization as a condition for receiving mincome. Sure, a good chunk of the people wouldn't go along with it (at first). That's fine - if they want to continue overpopulating the planet, the rest of society be damned, society doesn't need to provide for them. If they want to keep fucking like it's 1800 AD, they can also keep receiving the benefits of a ca. 1800 society - roads, police service, markets - and no guarantee of income. Eventually the employment situation will become so dire that they will be forced to either sterilize, or become homeless.

Anyone who's seen Bumfights knows the lengths homeless people will go to get a tiny bit of money. Sterilization is NOT far-fetched. Even I, as someone who's not currently homeless, would get sterilized in a heartbeat for mincome. The only people who would resist sterilization to the bitter end would be a small minority. The same percentage who today are Amish, or have 12 children.

I mean, your post was total drool - I'm going to have to ask for source on that 24-hour/9-month thing, but I know you can't provide it, being that it never happened - but I'll be damned if it didn't kick off a good idea. Linking sterilization to mincome (not mandating sterilization outright) may be the only politically palatable way to solve the overpopulation problem.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[rally2xs]

4.1% unemployment rate (3.5% is "full employment), 6.8% black unemployment rate (lowest recorded figure in US history), and the 2500 new Chrysler jobs negate these losses. Overall, we're in for boom times. The tax cut was just passed, wait for it to get going.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[rally2xs]

Waiting for your taxes to go up? That's what I thought. Mine's going down by $1.6K. Try it yourself:

https://www.calcxml.com/calcul...

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[sound vision]

Addendum: The "eat, sleep, and fuck" comment really shows the depths of your ignorance of human motivations and psychology. I mean - that's all the French aristocracy of the 1800s and the American aristocracy of today, who don't need to work, did right? (Since you need to have it spelled out: No) Have you never heard of football? Videogames? TV? Music lessons? Theater? Gardening? Reading? Psychedelic drugs? Auto racing and modding? Cooking? Well, I guess that last one is sorta food-related.

Are you autistic? If so, please keep in mind that you can't comprehend what the other humans around you do and think.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[HiThere]

Unh...with two jobs, two cars becomes sort of necessary. It's added expense, but presumably the job more than pays for it. And the house that a two income family can by these days is considerably inferior to that which my parents could buy with one income. The cost of computers, etc. are minor compared to the costs of food and housing. If you want to say that electronics has gotten more powerful and cheaper, I won't disagree with you, I'll just say that wouldn't be even approximately as important if decent housing were more affordable.

With that said, I'll admit that the generation of my parents was uniquely lucky. Their parents had much inferior housing, especially those that lived in urban surroundings. (At that time suburban was NOT desirable. But most of the population lived in rural settings, which had their good points. And a larger portion of the population owned their own homes than even in my parent's day. Of course, often the home would be condemned as uninhabitable today.)

I'm afraid that these days I count most of electronics as "opiate of the masses". Something to make unpleasant lives endurable. It's got lots of potentials, but those are largely undeveloped, because so many people just want to be mindlessly entertained so they don't need to think about the rest of their lives. (Well, admittedly, people will often desire to relax from stress, but when that's most of what they want, it's a sharp sign that something is really wrong.)

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[psycho12345]

Funny, my on paper taxes will drop 2k. My real taxes (in the form of higher inflation due to larger deficit and long term planning) are going to be much higher. I'm lucky too, I have an insanely good health plan. Most people will have the entirety of their tax cut eliminated by higher health care costs.

And if the GOP has their way, many people will watch their income drop more then 2k when they cancel Medicare, Medicaid and SS.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[sydbarrett74]

promising the coal miners that the 19th century will come back

If North Korea or some other nuclear-armed adversary decides to zap CONUS with an EMP, we very well might be thrown back to a 19th-century level of technological development.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Rande]

Servants to the people who have all the money and like to show off how they've got an army of maids and butlers?

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[painandgreed]

Look at rural and small town census tracts after the Great Recession -- there was no "after the recession" for them, it's still on. Sure they get lip service, but if you think anyone is going to prioritize the interests of an out-of-work coal miner over a fracking billionaire, consider that these are also the places which are ravaged by the opioid crisis. There's lots of posturing on that issue too, but no action. Drug wholesalers, over the course of two years, shipped nine million pills to a single pharmacy in West Virginia serving a community of less than four hundred people, and no politicians have proposed anything to prevent things like that happening again.

59,000 people are killed in the US by the opioid crisis annually, the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every two weeks, but we must tread carefully lest we harm drug company profits. I submit to you that demonstrates the lower value we put on the lives of those people relative to the lives of bankers.

If we can't be bothered lift a finger to save their lives, why would we save their jobs?

My own theory on this, is that rural America is the new 'inner city'. As industry gets more complicated, desires more efficient supply chains, requires a nearby large pool of skilled employees, there is very little economic reason to be located in small towns that used to be supported by manufacturing companies effectively running company towns. The only real reason will be farming and natural resource mining, which are being greatly automated. Instead of urban decay, we are experiencing rural decay. Those that can are moving out, those left possibly can't, and will probably cry that they don't want handouts, just jobs, just like those suffering from urban decay did after WW2.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[allonoak]

A major city suffers a blackout for more than 24 hours, and we find hospital delivery rooms overflowing 9 months later. Good luck implementing population control when the unemployable masses have little to do all day but eat, fuck, and sleep. That creative mental and physical outlet has already been proven. At least until the Fuckitron 3000 shows it can do that better than a human too.

Actually, this is relatively debunked and shouldn't be used to over-generalize the population.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[david_thornley]

In developed countries, births are not at replacement rate. In some, they fall pretty far short, potentially causing a serious demographic problem. Telling people "Sure, you'll have to scrimp and save to have kids, but isn't it worth it?" isn't a promising fix.

To look at it another way, we're all dependent on the next generations to support us in our old age. It isn't a matter of money, it's a matter of having enough people to do the work and still keep the economy going. Anyone who picks an increased standard of living rather than having kids is a leech on society, deliberately profiting by relying on other people to pay for what that person will need.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[david_thornley]

Can I come up with a neat solution for my house that works just fine but violates code and get it approved? No. If that neat solution is widely available, there will be a lot of pressure, and code will be changed.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[david_thornley]

By not being able to think like humans do, the machines aren't going to be able to address our needs.

You'd be surprised at how many things were in the category of "machines will never be able to do that" and are now performed by machines. (Besides, tough judgment calls are only tough because they're between choices that are roughly equally desirable or equally undesirable. You don't get a trolley problem if you can divert the trolley somewhere it won't run over people. If the choices are roughly equal, to the extent of the information available, either choice works.)

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[david_thornley]

A robot might be better at changing diapers, feeding, and burping. It won't be a good parent for a long, long time.

The baby needs human interaction for speech or emotional development pretty much from the start. If the parents are too impoverished to provide that, that's a problem we need to solve.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[david_thornley]

Hey, fucking for money is a job that's not going to be automated any time soon.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[RespekMyAthorati]

The fact is that in the U.S. there are about 150,000,000 people with below average intelligence, by definition.

Few of them will be employable 25 years from now.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[hey!]

That's a very interesting theory. Thanks for giving me something to think about.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[RespekMyAthorati]

Which is why we need one out of ten of us.

FTFY.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[geekmux]

A major city suffers a blackout for more than 24 hours, and we find hospital delivery rooms overflowing 9 months later.

Welcome to Snopes. May I interest you in a JATO-powered car?

Welcome to the island of Zanzibar, circa 2008, where a month-long blackout resulted in a 20% spike in births.

Sorry to burst your Snopes bubble, but the concept of an unemployable workforce and idle time extends well beyond 99% of the statistical evidence provided in the past. Eat, sleep, and fuck will be the activity du jour, with predictable results.

Re: They still don't fucking get it.

[Arunex]

if you don't recognize the rampant degeneracy of today's youth then I have bad news for you

Not just automation

[110010001000]

AI will also be coming for our jobs too. In fact, AI is already here and is eliminating entire categories of jobs.

Re:Not just automation

[Pfhorrest]

What distinction are you drawing between AI and automation? AI is what's driving the next wave of automation.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

"AI" is things like Siri, playing Go and Chess and deep learning neural networks (like artificial human brains). I am thinking automation is things like kiosks at McDonalds and stuff like that. I guess that could be considered AI too though!

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

There might not be what you can "general AI" yet, but we do have computers that can beat the best "Go" masters on the planet. Also, with deep learning neural networks we are exploring how the human brain really works, so general AI is inevitable.

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

AI will also be coming for our jobs too

No, it won't. You are a fool.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

It has already happened. With deep learning neural networks which think like the human brain, we already have systems that can replace a large swath of professions. Go ask a Go or Chess master how many job offers they get nowadays!

Re:Not just automation

[XxtraLarGe]

AI will also be coming for our jobs too. In fact, AI is already here and is eliminating entire categories of jobs "AI" is things like Siri, playing Go and Chess and deep learning neural networks (like artificial human brains).

I had a friend with a good paying Chess job that he just lost it to an A.I!

I am thinking automation is things like kiosks at McDonalds and stuff like that. I guess that could be considered AI too though!

Only if you consider ATMs or vending machines to be A.I.

Re:Not just automation

[Drethon]

It has already happened. With deep learning neural networks which think like the human brain, we already have systems that can replace a large swath of professions. Go ask a Go or Chess master how many job offers they get nowadays!

How many job offers did they get 10 years ago?

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

I am sorry to hear about your friend, but he needs to realize that progress is inevitable. Once they created a chess playing AI, we should have realized that it was only a matter of time before Go AI and poker AIs were created. And then of course AI will be created to replace doctors, lawyers and people who clean bathrooms and stuff. And yes: ATM and vending machines are a form of AI. How else would they work?

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

deep learning neural networks which think like the human brain

That's not at all how they work because we don't even understand how our brains do that so how the hell can we make something artificial that does? You have no idea what you're talking about, you're living in a fantasy world.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

You are missing the point. Since we can create AI programs that can play Go and Chess, we will soon have AI systems that can replace doctors, lawyers and everything in between. It is inevitable, especially with computers getting faster and faster every year.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Uh, why would they call the "neural nets" if they didn't work like human brains worked??? Plus they are "deep learning" so they learn at a deeper level.

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

No, you have no idea what you're talking about, you think what you see in movies and TV is real -- it's NOT. None of this "thinks". There's nobody in there. It's just a bunch of decision trees and things like that. No actual cognition. It's just software, it is not a "mind".

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Baloney. If it wasn't intelligence then they wouldn't be calling it "A.I". The "I" stands for "intelligence". A bunch of decision trees are just computer programs. I am talking about deep learning neural networks. It is completely different.

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

Confirmed for troll. Bugger off.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Yes, even now lawyers and doctors are being replaced by AI. I read one analysis that a computer with photographic memory could replace a doctor. It is inevitable.

Re:Not just automation

[Drethon]

You are missing the point. Since we can create AI programs that can play Go and Chess, we will soon have AI systems that can replace doctors, lawyers and everything in between. It is inevitable, especially with computers getting faster and faster every year.

Go and chess is a little different from doctors and lawyers. People who go to doctors and lawyers tend not to care how human the doctor or lawyer is (lawyers were questionable long before AI), they just want the job done. People who watch a go or chess tournament are interested in entertainment and watching who plays the most interesting strategy, not necessarily the most efficient.

Motorsports has started looking into AI driven race cars. This will be interesting but I'm not sure how successful it will be. Computer games have had AI players for a long time but some players insist on playing with others online, rather than against the AI. Given enough time, perhaps the AI personality will be convincing enough to feel the same as a human, just feels like that is a fairly long way off.

Re:Not just automation

[Hizonner]

Deep learning is still pretty stupid. It doesn't do what real intelligence does, namely achieve goals through directed action in unconstrained environments with incomplete information.

The thing is that that won't last. A few more breakthroughs along the lines of the last few years of deep learning, maybe in somewhat different areas, and you might very well have truly general AI.

You'll definitely get truly general AI sometime, because humans are just physical objects not magic. If humans are generally intelligent, then that can be and will be replicated by technology.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Definitely. Intelligence isn't magic. Technological progress is inevitable. My phone has more memory than the most powerful computers in the 1940s. So it is only a matter of time before general AI is here.

Re:Not just automation

[gweihir]

It is not really AI, it is plain dumb automation. But it is a lot cheaper now and a lot faster and accurate at being dumb. That is a killer. It will not replace the 1...10% of a low-skill job that actually cannot be done with "dumb", but that still means most workers in entire classes of jobs will not find work anymore.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Yes! And automated driving is right around the corner. They are already doing trials of automated driving in cities across the US, so it is inevitable that trucks will be automated in the future.

Re:Not just automation

[gweihir]

That "Go" thing was basically a stunt and entirely unfair. Also, "deep learning" is not any smarter than traditional learning and has nothing to do with human intelligence. Deep learning is what you do when you do not have a model of the target space that you could use to design the network. Results are worse than for designed networks, but they are a lot cheaper to obtain. Deep learning has no connection to what humans do when they think. Of course, most humans think rarely and hence much of what they do can be done by non-intelligent automation. And that is the problem we are facing.

And no, general AI is not even on the very distant horizon. We have absolutely nothing in machines that can produce even a dim glimmer if insight or understanding. And we do not even have a credible theory how it could be done. Maybe we will have that glimmer in 50 years, but certainly not before and we may still well never get it. The fact is that the closer we look at what humans do when they think, the more mysterious it gets. Humans can do things where it now looks very likely that the brain does not have enough computing power to do them, even if strong AI is possible. And consciousness? We have no clue at all what that is.

Re:Not just automation

[gweihir]

You misunderstand what "deep neural networks" are. They are in fact worse than flat networks, but flat networks need a human to structure them and that human need to understand the target problem. The only thing deep networks do is reduce the human part (the one needing actual intelligence) of training, at the price of worse performance both with regards to CPU cycles and accuracy.

Hence deep neural networks are not neural networks on steroids. They are a dumber, cheaper variant.

Re:Not just automation

[XxtraLarGe]

And yes: ATM and vending machines are a form of AI. How else would they work?

You seem to have a much different definition of A.I. than most people do. ATMs and Vending Machines don't do any problem solving.The follow instructions based on inputs, but do not derive their own conclusions about those inputs. Vending machines used to be completely mechanical. Adding a computer to keep track of supply & make change doesn't make them intelligent.

Re:Not just automation

[gweihir]

You really have no clue what you are talking about. The name "neural nets" comes from an expectation that was never fulfilled. Actual experts call them "statistical classifiers". And the "deep" part refers to the layering, not the power of what they can do. Even deep learning needs pre-classified data unless all you are interested in is the clusterings. In actual applications you will also need to know what the clusters are and that cannot be done by any machine on the planet, because it requires actual intelligence. Deep learning just makes the part to design the network cheaper and that is it. It does not perform better than a designed network.

Re:Not just automation

[religionofpeas]

ATMs and Vending Machines don't do any problem solving

They solve the problem of how to figure out what the customer wants, and get them to pay for their order.

Re:Not just automation

[ceoyoyo]

AI is also construction equipment that can level a site and build a foundation autonomously (that exists now), then build a skyscraper on it (will exist soon).

AI is a class of technology that will let automation push into job categories that were previously thought safe.

Re:Not just automation

[ceoyoyo]

A) you're arguing with a troll.

B) you're not really correct:

They're called neural nets because their basic structure was roughly inspired by actual neural networks. The individual elements are certainly extremely simplified, but it's an interesting question how much of that extra complexity is actually necessary.

The "deep" is indeed about how many layers there are, but that is very much involved in how much power to do things they have. There's a proof that deeper architectures can be exponentially more efficient than shallow ones.

Deep learning neural networks can be statistical classifiers, but most of the ones used today aren't really statistical, and many of them aren't classifiers.

You certainly can do unsupervised learning with deep neural networks, as well as related techniques like reinforcement learning. Unsupervised learning is often paired with a bit of supervised learning, but it is in humans too (someone taught you English). Reinforcement learning lets deep learning networks learn to perform tasks based only on things like good/not good feedback, which can be provided by the environment.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

I love how you call me a troll, but then repeat the exact thing I posted! Namely, that neural nets are called that because they are like real neural networks (the human brain). And that "deep" learning is "deeper" than shallow learning. That means it is more better than shallow learning. I think we are on the same page.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

Exactly. Are you claiming that we won't be colonizing other planets eventually? It is inevitable.

Re:Not just automation

[ceoyoyo]

You're quite a good troll. Not only are you pretty entertaining, but what you say is usually technically correct, just superficial, and calculated to grate on the Slashdot groupthink. I expect you probably post quite a bit of insightful stuff under a different name.

"'Deep' learning is 'deeper' than shallow learning". Hard to argue with that, except you convinced a bunch of random Slashdotters to try.

Well done.

Re:Not just automation

[110010001000]

I'm not trolling. I just believe that AI and space colonization is inevitable. After all, my first computer only had 64k of memory and look at computers now! Progress is inevitable. It doesn't require hard work or anything, it just is something that happens because progress. If you wish hard enough for something it will eventually come true. Everything is possible! Don't let reality destroy your dreams.

Re:Not just automation

[pipingguy]

Drafting no longer exists; a designer operates data-centric software and the drawings are automatically generated from the 3D model.

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

No, it's not a 'matter of time'. You are dumb.

Re:Not just automation

[Rick Schumann]

You dumb shits.. science does not even comprehend yet how the human brain produces the phenomenons of 'consciousness' and 'cognition' and 'self-awareness' and you actually unironically think that we can just throw more and more hardware at the shitty excuse for artificial intelligence they're shilling these days and it will just suddenly become conscious, self-aware, and fully cognitive/thinking? Who is engaging in the 'magical thinking' now? Sure as fuck isn't me! Put away your copy of Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Mycroft ("Mike") isn't going to suddenly spring into being, the whole approach to so-called AI is flawed to begin with due to lack of understanding, get a grip and come live in reality with the rest of us.

Re:Not just automation

[RespekMyAthorati]

Deep learning neural networks can be statistical classifiers, but most of the ones used today aren't really statistical, and many of them aren't classifiers.

Name one.

Re:What a revolution...

[110010001000]

But 57% of those will be women.

I'll reskill anyone who asks nicely.

[Narcocide]

Warning: requires a lot of college-level reading.

Re:I'll reskill anyone who asks nicely.

[Narcocide]

STFU astroturfer. Your own statement isn't even internally sound logically.

Re:I'll reskill anyone who asks nicely.

[Rick Schumann]

The vast majority of people that comment on the internet on subjects like this have no idea how limited so-called "AI" actually is and therefore make uninformed comments like yours. Meanwhile I know people who have worked in the industry, had a conversation with some of them about this sort of thing yesterday, and they *know* how limited it really is, how it can't really be trusted 100%, therefore you must have human minds to 'mind' the AI. Otherwise you invite disaster.

"reskilling" is bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that most of these people are surplus - their mental faculties will almost assuredly make them useless in any job that will survive this wave of automation. They are only the leading wedge of the surplus population.

Anyone with insight and an ounce of realism will realize that this all ends up with populations being culled via euthanasia because justifying the resources to keep unnecessary people alive isn't a political winner. Your moral arguments won't carry much weight when that becomes clear.

Luckily, I probably won't be alive to see the euthanasia begin, as i'm likely to check out within 15-20 years. But it's going to happen. Best prepare yourself for the first suggestion of it. It'll be within _your_ lifetime, for sure.

Re:"reskilling" is bullshit

[Narcocide]

Someone you've deemed too stupid to survive is probably going to kill you and eat you.

Re:"reskilling" is bullshit

[RespekMyAthorati]

Population control doesn't necessarily involve euthanasia.

An artificial virus that aborts 4 out 5 embryos will do.

Re:Time for the robot tax

[Thud457]

"robot tax"?
the way this world is run, ya'll gettin' the robot ax . And you all know it.

Re:What a revolution...

[CrimsonAvenger]

And note that only one in six of that less than 1% would be unable to find work without retraining.

Frankly, this sounds more like a typical year in the Real World (tm) than a "revolution"....

Re:What a revolution...

[sjames]

Easily said by someone who doesn't believe his will be one of the jobs lost and who feels sure he won't be left with no prospect of ever having a job again.

Thought exercize, Trump signs a law that Kjella shall never be employed again. Do you now choose to starve in the streets or take what you need and the law be damned?

Unlikely. More likely, someone else in that position notices that you have what they need...

Re:Time for the robot tax

[religionofpeas]

For every job that a robot replaces, they must pay someone the equivalent wage of the pre robot job

How many wages for a tractor ?

Re:They get it.

[Hizonner]

... except that peasants were valuable economic assets. You couldn't farm the fields and build the castle without peasants.

Peasants are still needed at the moment, but for how long? And what happens afterwards?

Problem

[ebonum]

These people (not 100%, maybe 90%) are in these jobs for a reason = mostly an inability or unwillingness to learn more valuable skills.

What to do with them is a problem. The US is an expensive place to live.

Please stop telling people to reskill

[rsilvergun]

it didn't work when the blue collar jobs went overseas and it's not going to work now. That's because:

a) older folks learn slower than young folks (fact)

b) it's kinda hard to work full time supporting the family you made when you had a job and go to school full time.

c) A lot of the folks being asked to re-skill didn't make it through college the first time when they were young and still had the support of their parents and access to scholarships only available to high school seniors

d) Nobody wants to support these folks while they go back to school, since that means tax hikes and we just did a $1.5 trillion dollar tax _cut_.

This is precisely why Hilary lost the election. Just telling them to reskill isn't an answer. It's not going to work. Think of something else or get ready for some pain while they elect God only knows what kind of people in a desperate attempt to find someone who will listen to them.

Re:Please stop telling people to reskill

[Nidi62]

it didn't work when the blue collar jobs went overseas and it's not going to work now. That's because: b) it's kinda hard to work full time supporting the family you made when you had a job and go to school full time.

Did you even read the summary? From TFS:

Report highlights the urgent need for a massive reskilling programme, safety nets to support workers while they reskill, and support with job-matching.

And the summary is right. At some point we are either going to have to have massive retraining efforts, instill some sort of strong, robust social safety net (UBI, strong unemployment, whatever), or face the horribly destabilizing and violence-producing effects of massive numbers of idle, frustrated, unemployed people. It's your choice.

Re:Please stop telling people to reskill

[networkBoy]

Black market econ.
Already have plans in that direction :)

Re:Please stop telling people to reskill

[jezwel]

At some point we are either going to have to have massive retraining efforts, instill some sort of strong, robust social safety net (UBI, strong unemployment, whatever), or face the horribly destabilizing and violence-producing effects of massive numbers of idle, frustrated, unemployed people. It's your choice.

The USA is built on the freedom to make your own way in life, whether that's upwards or downwards. If you make it, great. If you don't, too bad - I've got mine so FOAD.
Your country is not prepared to maintain universal medicare, let alone a 'strong, robust, social safety net'. Until you sort out your overall corruption at all levels of government - and the mess that brings, your country will continue to spiral down into irrelevance & oblivion. Lucky for you that you have such a massive base to keep you propped up for quite some time.
Fingers crossed my US friends and family will have passed before huge disruption occurs, OR that someone somehow gets into power that actually makes a lasting difference.

Re:Please stop telling people to reskill

[bingoUV]

horribly destabilizing and violence-producing effects of massive numbers of idle, frustrated, unemployed

There will be no violence. Because the surveillance state is preceding the automation economy. It is not a coincidence.

Re:Please stop telling people to reskill

[RespekMyAthorati]

someone somehow gets into power that actually makes a lasting difference.

There already is.
Unfortunately, it is a bad difference.

Reskill into what?

[apoc.famine]

I skimmed the article to find out, and came up with this gem:

According to this forecast, only one job family—Production—will experience an overall net job decline. However, both Production and Office and Administrative roles are set to experience a significant employment decline. Unlike Production, however, the Office and Administrative job family is forecast to experience sufficient new job gains as well in roles like Billing, Cost and Rate Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, and Customer Service Representatives to counter-balance the shrinking of other occupational categories, such as Data Entry Keyers, File Clerks, Mail Clerks, and Administrative Assistants

So one of their super amazing findings is that data entry people will reskill into receptionists, and we'll need a lot more of those.

It seems to me that they don't have any idea what they're talking about. If you have less jobs under the Office and Administrative category from losing data based ones, you don't need more billing people and receptionists. And how is billing not going to see a similar reduction?

They seem to miss the fundamental issue here, which is that we're quickly getting to the point of being able to replace all of the jobs they think that we'll need more of that we could fill with the people already being made redundant. Some how their magic math shows that we can just retrain people for existing jobs and then we'll suddenly need lots more people in those positions. If that doesn't happen, a lot of the article falls apart. If those jobs also start going away, they're arguing for exactly the wrong approach.

I don't know about everyone else's office, but around here we're not hiring more receptionists and customer service reps. The trend is in the opposite direction, actually. Overall, just a rather fantastical article that seems detached from reality. It sounds good, and if you're selling retraining services, I bet it sounds even better.

Re:What a revolution...

[geekmux]

According to the BLS some 154 million Americans are employed. That <1% of those jobs would disappear in 8 years, in fact less than 0.1% per year sounds like the most unrevolutionary revolution ever. We'll all run out of jobs like... year 3000.

If there's one thing we humans are pretty damn good at, it's massively underestimating the future.

Remove every waitress, barista, cashier, and other automation-targeting jobs from the employment market. Now you've just removed the very jobs that the uneductated masses use in order to become educated, removing the lowest rungs on the Ladder of Success.

After automation decimates every job out there that doesn't require a decade of experience, we'll soon find that go-get-an-education mantra we've been preaching to the buggy whip makers of yesteryear isn't going to work either. That's because we'll have "good enough" AI solutions that will be coming for the educated jobs. The entire justification of higher education tends to become pointless when humans are unemployable, so that entire education business gets decimated as well. The economy will be reduced to a shadow of its former self.

This will all happen because of Obscene Greed. Automation and AI creators don't give a shit about the end-game. They care about making billions now. And spare me the UBI speech. We can't even get the 1% to pay taxes now, so UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the billions living in the Global Welfare State, which also won't do jack shit to revive a decimated economy.

Regardless of that dystopian future, "reskilling" isn't even a viable solution today for one simple reason; not all humans are created equal. There's usually a damn good reason someone spends an entire career as a ditch-digger. Mental capacity is not some unproven theory.

Re:women should stay home

[Jhon]

Under his eye, my brother.

(ducks and runs).

Re:Time for the robot tax

[tbannist]

42 of course.

Re:Why bother mentioning women?

[Narcocide]

No, but the women won't care otherwise.

Re:Fewer jobs for more people

[Jhon]

Dayworld as a viable option. Who knew Farmer was a prophet?

Re:What a revolution...

[Hizonner]

Nobody wants to go to a non-automated world.

What people want is to make sure that we keep being "much better for it".

At some point, the new jobs that get created are probably going to be beyond most people. A bit further along than that, and the machines will be better than all humans at most new jobs... before those jobs get created. Humans win now because they're generally intelligent. When machines have that, there are going to be a helluva lot fewer jobs for humans, if any.

I guess things like "racecar driver" could be among them, but only if the whole draw of the "race" is that the "cars" are human-driven. Things that have to be done by humans are going to end up as a small niche. Even sex may not be on the list.

If 99 percent of economic value is created by machines, how do you allocate that value? Are you going to keep giving it all to to whoever happened to have an ancestor that happened to own the right machine at the right time? Forever? Or are you going to give it all to a few racecar drivers and the very best prostitutes?

Re:Why bother?

[Narcocide]

Let them starve.

Morally bankrupt, stupid, and short-sighted. Do you think hundreds of millions of starving plebes will just roll over and die peacefully? Do you think even if they did, that it wouldn't be a huge colossal waste of the energy that was invested into growing them in the first place? Do you think that even if it wasn't, that civilization-destroying pestilence wouldn't just take the place of civil unrest? Do you think this has never happened before?

Re:They get it.

[geekmux]

Jobs are going to disappear to robots, so we need to bring in immigrants to do the jobs that American robots won't do.

Yeah, we are pretty much fucked. The experiment in class mobility and the death of the aristocracy stands on the razor's edge. Now cheer, peasant, cheer for your Lords and Masters, that they might toss you a loaf of bread.

Lords and Masters? Uh no. With the amount of people they're looking to turn into peasants, the concept of Eat the Rich will become reality faster than you can say HFT millisecond.

This was foreseen

[Gravis Zero]

Lots of people have foreseen this problem for a long time, myself included. I've also foreseen that the concept of UBI (universal basic income) will be rejected because of ideology as well as the sheer number of people living in denial about the problem. The workers threatened by automation that are in unions will try (and fail) to outlaw the technologies that are going replace them. Truckers are already doing this but it's a failing strategy. It's only when a very large number of people are their most desperate that UBI will be considered to be an option.

Re:This was foreseen

[dcw3]

UBI is coming. It's just a matter of time, and how long it will take to convince the majority that it's necessary. It's a good thing that UBI experiments are ongoing since there are many flavors of it, we need to see what works and what doesn't.

Universal Basic Income

[Wookie Monster]

We live in a world of extreme surplus, but we're still stuck to the notion that you must work to live. For those humans that can't get a job, do we feed them or treat them as useless? If useless, do we exterminate them? If so, how far do you go? Until there's one last human and everything is automated for him/her?

I like the idea of Universal Basic Income, but I fear that human instinct will cause it to fail. Remember, work hard! Millions on welfare depend on you! I have a difficult time letting go of this notion.

Re:Universal Basic Income

[ErichTheRed]

I think that once things get bad enough, you're going to start seeing things like potential parents having to prove an above-average or even superior IQ to avoid being sterilized. And when that isn't enough, everyone below a certain IQ is just going to get euthanized.

Universal income will never take hold until something like this has been tried, unfortunately. The US is too wrapped up in the Protestant work ethic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethos and just plain greed. You'll never get the rich and intelligent classes to pay for the rest of society to live until there's a very good chance the guillotine will make a reappearance...or maybe even after.

Re:Universal Basic Income

[jeff4747]

I think that once things get bad enough, you're going to start seeing things like potential parents having to prove an above-average or even superior IQ to avoid being sterilized

I'd like to point out Fred Trump was a very smart man who built a large real estate business. His son, not so much. In fact, his son went bankrupt running a casino. Twice.

IQ of the parents is not a very good indicator that the children will be smart.

Re:Universal Basic Income

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

IQ of the parents is not a very good indicator that the children will be smart.

Sad, but true; due to an unfortunate but well-known statistical phenomenon called Regression toward the Mean, - or in Trump's case, the Downright Evil.

Re:Universal Basic Income

[bingoUV]

Why spare those with superior IQ ? When machines are smarter than the 10 smartest humans combined , and then some ?

Re:They get it.

[Rick Schumann]

Jobs are going to disappear to robots

No, they're not. This is what fools actually believe.

Re:Why bother?

[mujadaddy]

Do you think hundreds of millions of starving plebes will just roll over and die peacefully?

That's what the Killbots are for...

Re:Excuse to expand Government

[Narcocide]

You should just be happy there's a slight chance that some of these people will finally be forced to do their own homework.

Seems orders of magnitude low

[jbattan]

If the takeaway is indeed âoe1.4 million U.S. jobs will be hit by automation between now and 2026â, that seems very low. My startup alone is projected to displace 250,000-5000,000 jobs in the US within five years.

1.4 Way Low

[DumbSwede]

Multiple thoughts on how this is being presented. To me 1.4 million seems WAY on the low side with things like automated driving, delivery, order fullfillment likely arriving before that. McDonald’s new order Kiosks are horrible, but likely they will have voice input on the next go round. Why the emphasis of the likely impact on women? Likely minorities by race will be affected much more.

Let’s not be Pollyannaish about this. The only way this doesn’t get dark and ugly is with universal basic income. It should be phased in slowly, and the rich only get richer if they continue to provide more for the masses as well. Just because technology created new kinds of labor faster than job loss in the past, doesn’t mean it will this time round. In the past we moved from physical labor to mental labor. I don’t buy the we will all move to “creative” labor. Mental labor will likely only pay well for those way up the skill ladder, especially as more people try to enter the mental labor force and drive wages down.

Re:1.4 Way Low

[110010001000]

That is what I am thinking too. Once they have voice input on the kiosks there will be no reason to have people at McDonalds. And Amazon will be delivering packages via automated trucks and drones soon too. They just have to figure out how to get the package up the steps to the house, but once they do they will be ready to get rid of delivery drivers!

Not everyone can re-skill even if they have to

[ErichTheRed]

I think that a lot of people who are just assuming everything is going to be OK with this next transition are going to be in for a surprise. Automation is also coming for knowledge workers, at all levels. Assume doctors didn't have an ironclad professional organization that will never allow them to be replaced or marginalized. Right now, the requirements for medical school are a photographic memory, a straight-A academic record and the ability to live through a rigorous training regime. With automation, that photographic memory is no longer as important because you don't need to have the entire body of medical knowledge in your brain. You also may be able to get away with accepting students with a 3.5 GPA or even lower. Salaries are going to drop overall because of facts like these.

In addition, consider the following very different, yet very similar hypothetical workers:
- Factory worker in a well-paying part of the country, who has been placing Part A on Part B and tightening Bolt C (or some other assembly skill) for their entire working life since high school, and is at the top of their potential skill level
- Big-company general office worker, who has been accepting email from Department A, performing work item B, and emailing the result to Department C since they got their Business Management degree from Big State University

Both of these workers are toast once automation comes for their jobs, and this time there's nothing they can be trained to do. Don't forget that we told the factory workers to go get office jobs, and we forced the office job holders through college for a generation or two.

Re:Not everyone can re-skill even if they have to

[110010001000]

You are right. You can replace a doctor with a computer that has photographic memory. Good thing doctors have an ironclad professional organization that prevents this happening. I just wish we all had such luck.

Re:What a revolution...

[Rick Schumann]

You're living in a fantasy world.

Re:What a revolution...

[Hizonner]

If the machines are producing huge amounts of goods and services, I have trouble seeing how that's a "decimated economy".

That's a very productive economy with an output allocation problem.

Re:Why bother?

[Rick Schumann]

You are right, and too many in this 'discussion' are living in a fantasy world. You put huge swaths of people out of work permanently, there will be crime, and there will be civil wars. It'd potentially destroy our entire civilization. Of course none of this will happen, new jobs that never existed before will just happen and people will have work. Happened before, will happen again. That's what all these myopians can't see.

Re:Fewer jobs for more people

[Narcocide]

The funny thing is, this used to be assumed common sense; that automation would eventually lead to ubiquitous lives of luxury for everyone. We were all supposed to be looking forward to being able to devote more time to art and love and health. Somewhere along the line people seem to have lost sight of the goal posts. Now they think that carrying the ball is a goal in and of itself.

But how do you deal with a post-scarcity society when a clue is the one thing left that nobody can find?

Re:"get off my lawn" is now boasting.

[Nidi62]

Being too old to be employed and having planned for retired life is making me look like a genius rather than a boomer asshole.

Or just looking like someone lucky enough to have been born at a time when you were still likely to accrue a pension your entire working life. Enjoy your starting at $300k 55+ "active adult" community that it seems makes up at least 50% of new home construction, driving up prices for everyone else.

Re:Fine.

[Rick Schumann]

And when you think they're dying in a ditch, they're breaking into your house and robbing and killing you so they can survive. Or starting a civil war. Because people do not just lay down and die because YOU want them to. And if you go around executing them like so much farm animals, you'll just make the civil war happen that miuch faster. Then when YOUR head is on a pole somewhere, THEY will be in charge -- and our civilization will be destroyed, and we'll have to start all over again from scratch. That's what your sort of thinking gets us.

We have to have a care for our own species, damnit! Otherwise WE ARE NOT CIVILIZED! So fuck off with this bullshit about 'leaving people to die in a ditch', you jackass.

Good luck in the US with that!

[no-body]

Ruling thought of people pulling strings there is: If you are not doing well, you are doing something wrong, you need to be penalized so you learn to do it right.

That's not a fact but a religious-like thought model to create peace of mind and justify why it is good to accumulate Millions/Billions of green stuff and using it to multiply it and game the system. Citizens United, sponsoring - ah, bribing is the right name - politicians to do the "right" thing for them with the help of "how to make friends and influence people" oh, old story, nowadays it's think tanks, https://cambridgeanalytica.org... trying to turn opinions with twitter, facebook, manipulate voting district boundaries to gain advantages etc... How much more sick can it get?

Stepping into an office with a request and the individual on the desk opens his desk drawer and asks "how can I help you"...

Green stuff and power is an addictive drug changing one's brain structure to turn any decency, integrity and common sense off and to the thing, is it ruining parts of a population, People kill (ah, direct others to do it for - guess what) with that mind frame and they accumulate in higher position of societies, states and countries.

So - where are the Eliot Ness characters these days where this system failure of a POTUS has promised to do the job and defrauded everyone who was stupid enough to take the bait? Maybe Robert Mueller is of that type and him succeeding lets others discover their guts?

Enjoy the Armageddon show when you can!
 

It's time to create NEW jobs, not rehash old ones

[Provocateur]

Robot inspector, for one.

Robot attendance checker.

Robot dance instructor.

Robot speech trainer. (Must they all speak in a dull.Shatner.impression. in.that.metallic.monotone?)

Come on, I can't think of everything; I'm stuck in the *present*

Re:Excuse to expand Government

[mi]

Economics 102: the very measure of the importance/value of anything is other people's willingness to pay for it.

That is, if these people's labor really is valuable, they don't need my charity. But then either the report in TFA is wrong, or the report and you are talking about different people.

Re:What a revolution...

[110010001000]

Exactly. It is only a matter of time when machines have general intelligence. It is not an "if" but a "when". After all, progress is inevitable.

Re:They get it.

[DickBreath]

> so we need to bring in immigrants to do the jobs that American robots won't do.

We have always used immigrants to do the jobs that no American will do.

That's why all of Trump's wives are immigrants.

Petroleum Engineers

[Ulfilas2000]

Petroleum Engineers are some of the best paid engineers out there. If America paid everyone to reskill into becoming a Petroleum Engineer then Americans would be much better off.

Re:Petroleum Engineers

[jeff4747]

Because when you massively increase supply, price remains the same!

Re:Petroleum Engineers

[Ulfilas2000]

How come you got 2 points for that response?

Re:Petroleum Engineers

[jeff4747]

Because some people notice sarcasm on the Internet?

Re:They get it.

[gweihir]

Zero argument and an unsophisticated insult. Do you actually have something to contribute? If you have no clue about the topic at hand, at least try to be funny...

Re:What a revolution...

[110010001000]

Exactly! We are very close to creating A.I. that could replace waitresses and baristas. Then they will come for our jobs! Then what will we do???

Re:Fine.

[Hizonner]

Can't argue with this...

Re:Why bother?

[Hizonner]

Sexual reproduction is a fad.

Re:Why bother?

[Dragonslicer]

Do you think hundreds of millions of starving plebes will just roll over and die peacefully?

That's what the Killbots are for...

Even jackbooted thugs are losing their jobs to automation.

Re:They get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

That always cracks me up. In the past, you might have a peasant rebellion. These days, a single Sarin gas canister would get rid of not just an entire rebellion, but ensure it won't happen again, due to residual poison left in the area. Or, a single A10 with some BRRT.

Sorry. Syria showed us what happens when revolutions happen. It just means a lot of dead stupid civilians, and showing that the people in charge can stay in charge. Revolution is impossible these days.

Safety net generally means 6 months

[rsilvergun]

or at least it does to most people. It's certainly what I think of when I hear the phrase.

Also, what the devil are they going to retrain for? We're about to put every cashier and driver out of work. They're not all going to go off and be doctors, most folks just don't have the capacity. I guess we could think up new service jobs, but who's gonna pay them? It's not looking like folks are gonna have much money.

Also, you're assuming folks need to work or they become listless and frustrated and violent. I think that's only going to be a problem if they don't have enough money for food/shelter and (maybe, big maybe) a modicum of living (e.g. have a kid or two, go get drunk occasionally, that sort of thing).

All I see is more folks trying to put the onus on people to 're-skill' without talking about how they're gonna do that, if they even _can_ do that and where are the jobs going to come from. It sounds like blame shifting so we can all look the other way while 20% of the country's lives go to shit. That's certainly the vibe I got from Hillary Clinton.

get rid of the college part and open trades up

[Joe_Dragon]

get rid of the collage part and open trades up.

The college idea will be that credits do not transfer and not only do you need to retake classes you also need to take filler classes. We may be able to wave must take on campus housing for at least first 2 years.

But any one get get a loan even people who just got out prison.

Re:get rid of the college part and open trades up

[jeff4747]

Trades are not complicated. They will not be all that hard to automate.

And a robotic plumber that can actually crawl through pipes will do far better at diagnosing and fixing problems than a human plumber that must break open walls or dig up pipes to access them.

1.6M = millions

[sdinfoserv]

Despite the sensationalist headline, 1.6M displaced workers out of the total number of jobs is hardly worth the billions that will be demanded for federal programs. Considering 5 million jobs - over 3 times this sensationalist number - have been outsourced since 2000
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/2...
maybe the time to scream has passed....
Considering the GOP has the House, Senate, and Oval Office, the stomach in the US for additional programs is small....

Re:1.6M = millions

[jeff4747]

This report reaches it's low prediction of 1.6M workers by making assumptions like we will hire a lot more receptionists while laying off data entry clerks.

It's not clear why we'd hire receptionists, or who they would be receiving. Especially with the existing trend of not having receptionists at all.

Re:They get it.

[liquid_schwartz]

That always cracks me up. In the past, you might have a peasant rebellion. These days, a single Sarin gas canister would get rid of not just an entire rebellion, but ensure it won't happen again, due to residual poison left in the area. Or, a single A10 with some BRRT.

Sorry. Syria showed us what happens when revolutions happen. It just means a lot of dead stupid civilians, and showing that the people in charge can stay in charge. Revolution is impossible these days.

Remember that when they tell you that sniper rifles must be banned even though a single real crime has never been committed with one (other than the victimless crime of possession). The elites know their limits and are working hard to ensure their uninterrupted rule. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:You still don't fucking get it.

[fluffernutter]

We prefer people doing some thing.

Furthermore, most companies don't really care what the people want any more. Even if people do prefer to order a hamburger from a human, these companies simply don't care. McDonald's does it, Burger King does it, and on and on until the rest don't matter.

Re:What a revolution...

[ceoyoyo]

What we have now is a very productive economy with an output allocation problem. Our current solution to that problem is to invent busywork that we can "pay" people to do.

Automation will certainly kill jobs, but it will also wipe away the delusion that many jobs are anything but make work. Then we'll actually have to solve the allocation problem.

Re:Why bother?

[fluffernutter]

Sure, nothing fundamental changed in the economy like globalism or anything. We'll be fiiiine.

Re:Reskilling is horrible

[sheramil]

Yes... I suspect the "reskilling" revolution will be actually looking ahead. There's no point in retraining people to do work that is just going to be in the next wave (or the one after that) of jobs that are automated.

(sweetly)And what jobs might those be? Can you tell us? I've retrained so many times that I often joke about becoming a politician or a policeman next, because it seems every field I get into EVAPORATES.

Re:Why bother mentioning women?

[HiThere]

Because they didn't want to say that most of the jobs lost were low paid and poor status.

Re:Fine.

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

So you would rather your taxes go for paying for prisons instead of assisting those that need re-training due to the loss of a job category?

Doesn't this country already have enough people in prison?

There will always be jobs

[backslashdot]

There will always be jobs, unless anarchy or anti-jobs laws rule.

For one thing, even if robots do 99.9% of the work .. we will still have jobs. Whether it is in space exploration or finding cures for every disease. We still haven't colonized the oceans, we still haven't even put a person on Mars .. let alone colonized it with highways and houses. We still don't have deep space hotels or asteroid mining colonies. My biggest fear is that as humans get more prosperous they reproduce less .. every rich country has kids less than the replacement rate. Today the population growth in nearly all the wealthy countries is ENTIRELY from immigration and from the poor in those countries. Countries that dont allow immigration like Russia and Japan are seeing negative population growth. If everyone is prosperous and has access to good healthcare they won't have enough kids.

Re:There will always be jobs

[jeff4747]

Whether it is in space exploration or finding cures for every disease.

Why do we need a human to do that?

What's your plan for the people who are physically or mentally unsuited for those pursuits?

We still haven't colonized the oceans, we still haven't even put a person on Mars

And why would we pay people money to do that? We've got an ton of robots that can go do that and not require air or food production.

We still don't have deep space hotels or asteroid mining colonies

Who would pay to stay at those hotels when robots do all the work? Why would humans be the miners when robots do it better, faster and again do not require air or food?

Re:There will always be jobs

[david_thornley]

We still haven't colonized the oceans

Why do we need to colonize the oceans? If we have too many people, we might want to put some underwater, but colonist isn't really a job.

We still don't have deep space hotels or asteroid mining colonies.

We're not going to get deep space hotels any time soon. Getting off this rock into LEO is really, really expensive, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Asteroid mining colonies? Sure, that's fairly plausible, if not in the near future, but since very few people will get off-planet, there won't be many jobs there.

If everyone is prosperous and has access to good healthcare they won't have enough kids.

Is this a basic law of nature, or is it a result of economics? It used to be that children were economically useful, and now they're quite expensive. Perhaps we should put some research and resources into solving this.

Re:There will always be jobs

[RespekMyAthorati]

For one thing, even if robots do 99.9% of the work .. the remaining 0.1% still have jobs.

FTFY.

Re:What a revolution...

[HiThere]

Two caveats here:
1) Many jobs depend on flexible mobile bodies. Currently people are better at that as well as more intelligent.
2) Any prediction has to estimate amount of power storable by size and weight. You don't get a human replacing robot if it weight a ton.

Of course, robots will be designed in assorted sizes, shapes, and weights, but for many uses the question will revolve around the amount of power exerted for amount of time by a robot the approximate size and weight of a human. Currently this can't be done in a reasonable way, even if you ignore that current robots are too stupid. One way to partially solve this is to have a sessile computer+program controlling a robot body as a telefactor. This is doable, but imposes its own restrictions.

germany has trade schools

[Joe_Dragon]

germany has trade schools. But in the usa they want you go to collage and maybe even a trade school after that to fill your skill gap but the pay you will get will not help you pay off your $150-200K+ student loans. Unless you went to med school.

Re:germany has trade schools

[ctilsie242]

The ironic thing is that here in the US, one obtains zero knowledge that deals with the real world. Yes, one may know stuff about Shakespeare and some Common Core math, but things like balancing a checkbook, looking at the long term cost of something are not taught, much less trade skills. No, a machinist may not be a top tier position, but it pays the bills, and it takes expertise to make tool paths to not fuck up the work, hard jaws versus soft jaws, etc. Similar with plumbing, HVAC work, and an electrician.

College is nice, but the issue is that it isn't a must for most jobs. In fact, if someone wants a high-paying DevOps job, knowing a CI/CD pipeline, being able to code in the latest language fashion of the month, and be able to have basic social skills will be able to get one a decent career path.

Here in the US, it would be nice to have a career path. In Germany, the government pays for tradeskill lessons or college. The result is that the populace in general is a lot more skilled. Having that here would be nice, because the more skills, the more tools one has available to adapt or change. For example, and old hand machinist can leap to CNC machining.

Re:germany has trade schools

[uncqual]

I think what Germany does makes a lot of sense. However, remember, that students are diverted into the "trade" path at a quite young age based on academic performance. I don't think that will fly in the US because parents will scream "discrimination" when their kid does poorly in school and is shunted to the trade school path -- even when it was the parent's failure to instill the value education, homework, and discipline into their spawn.

And, almost anyone who ends up with $150K-$200K of student debt and doesn't have a degree that is in demand did something VERY stupid and probably -- or actually, a lot of things very stupid. It doesn't take long to figure out that a BA degree in Gender Studies with a minor in Ancient Greek Mythology after taking seven years to finish those degrees is going to qualify you for a job where the most important skills is asking "Would you like fries with that?".

Re:germany has trade schools

[ctilsie242]

It can happen even if one has a relevant major. If one graduates into a crappy economy (like those who graduated December of 2008), student loans capitalize, and that much student debt can be easily amassed just through having to kick the can due to forbearances.

The US is the only country which has this system where if one wants to better themselves, they have to mortgage their entire life. China, Russia, Chile, and most of Europe, college and/or trade programs are "free". They understand that if they want a "harvest" (i.e. skilled people), they have to plant "seeds" (as in education.) This is a fact that seems lost in the US.

Re:germany has trade schools

[Anonymous Coward]

"Balance a checkbook"??? How old are you? People under the age of 50 have never needed to balance a checkbook.

Trade skills are commonly taught by community colleges, which offer (generally) two year degrees after high school. Community colleges are cheap and extremely common, how is it possible you don't know about them? Why are you talking about a subject you are completely ignorant of?

Please post less.

Re:germany has trade schools

[zidium]

I'm 36 and I remember balancing a checkbook until the early 2000s...

Re: germany has trade schools

[reanjr]

If you went to a school with an NCAA team, you have no business complaining about student loans. We know why you picked that school over the host of reasonably priced alternatives, and we don't want to hear your whining now that you've graduated and can't pay your loans. You had alternatives, but they weren't cool enough or prestigious for you, we get it. Go be a snowflake.

57 percent

[cascadingstylesheet]

Of those, 57 percent belong to women.

Why ... does that matter?

Is that supposed to make us care more or something?

False assumption of fault.

[edgedmurasame]

Retraining falsely assumes that the displaced or jobless are at sole fault. Employers still have a entitlement mentality that keeps too many out of work, especially the long-term jobless.

As supply increases, value decreases

[LostMyBeaver]

We are moving towards automation of our core requirements. Humanity requires three core categories of sustenance :
a) Food and water
b) Housing
c) Energy

If we leave out sex as a fourth requirement (though I'm hesitant to do so as I'm practically a dog at heart), we do not need anything more than what is listed above.

Food
We will eventually have 3d printers in our houses that are supplied by cartridges of core materials to produce meals of sustenance. They may or may not be yummy, but they will provide us with the nutrients we need to survive. The supply chain can eventually over time be automated as well. I've always dreamed of using underground tunnels with high pressure sodium lighting, air filtering, etc... to produce massive amounts of food of high quality rapidly. I have considered most of the details of automation, and I can't see why humans would have to be too involved with the process if the crops are managed and harvested using overhead robotic arms. It will have many bugs (technical and creepy crawly) at first, but over time, it could prove to be able to provide extremely high quality produce reliably and with minimal toxicity. With good generic alterations of the seeds, it should be possible to have almost perfect crops at almost all times. By improving the delivery chain through automation, a house could order what they need only when they need it and therefore greatly reduce waste.

An alternative approach to 3d printing is a meal on wheels kind of solution which would have centralized kitchens producing meals to order using machines and delivering them via drones. This could be more practical.

Real meat will become a luxury and we'll either switch to eating bug meat or we'll switch to eating meat grown from stem cells. I believe stem cells makes more sense. But we'll do away with animal farms in the future as they're terrible for the planet, generally inhumane and they require far too much work for something we can do far better with stem cells. Also consider that we waste more than 30% of the meat we produce currently. Milk is actually not a requirement of life, but if we decide to keep it around, I have no answer to how to do that.

Water
Most of humanities problems with water can be resolved with better logistics. There are places on earth which are perfect for managing water and there are places which are not. For example, California is not a good place for water. If we force people to abandon California for more suitable places like Colorado or even Alaska and Canada for example, we can solve many of our water supply problems. In addition, thanks to problems in places like South Africa today, we will put a great deal more effort into solving water supply chain problems. This can be done through reclamation, filtration, etc... we will get better with water by necessity sooner than later and these systems will be highly automated over time.

Housing
As we automate waste removal which already has seen massive improvements through trucks that can lift trash cans from the side of the road using arms... we will see further automation of gathering of raw materials. The raw materials will be collected and shipped to recycling plants which automatically sort trash (see waste management in places like Sandefjord Norway) and once the materials are properly sorted, much material can be automatically reprocessed into raw materials for new construction.

China has made massive progress in flatpack housing, highrises, even almost complete cities. Trucks are loaded with click together housing components in the opposite order they should be removed from the trucks. Cranes are then operated to remove item by item to click into place and with little additional work, a house could be built in a an hour or two using nothing but self driving and self operating robots. The factories will eventually be automated to produce the components using automated systems. With a little more work, the materials delivered from trash recycling (parti

Re:As supply increases, value decreases

[pipingguy]

How can you be a sex dog if username is LostMyBeaver?

Re:As supply increases, value decreases

[networkBoy]

mate...
That was an interesting take. I think you have a lot of assumptions about the velocity that all this will happen at, even in the overall trajectory is accurate. And there is one special breed of lawyer that won't die: attack dogs (Divorce and personal injury). Since those lawsuits are emotionally driven more than anything else, I expect those lawyers to last a good long time.

Re:As supply increases, value decreases

[RespekMyAthorati]

How can you be a sex dog if username is LostMyBeaver?

Because she's been spayed.

Re:Reskilling is horrible

[ceoyoyo]

I'd put my bet on artist, musician, poet, or similar. The society we live in is a system adapted to the exponential growth and political conditions existing around the allocation of capital that prevailed in the twentieth century. It's going to change, and I strongly suspect that questions like "what fields should we reskill workers into?" are going to sound ridiculous a generation or two down the line.

Re:What a revolution...

[HiThere]

I think you have things in the wrong order.

One of the requirements of being a bartender used to be being appropriately social with customers. This will become (more) needed also by waitresses and baristas. These jobs are quite difficult to automate. Robot servitors are an advance over a vending machine until they are socially adept and people accept them as such. But there's likely to be a period when they will be roundly hated by the customers.

Entry level lawyers, accountants, etc. are already feeling the pinch, and this will get worse. There are signs that artists and music composers will also be impacted, but they are ambiguous. Certainly musicians have already been largely automated away, except for social presence. And sometimes then, see Hatsune Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . (That it's largely faked up now doesn't say anything about the future, when it's more feasible.)

There are questions as to what level AI is required for certain jobs, like computer programmer. It *seems* as if it would require a strongly advanced AI, but I'm not certain. There might be ways of redesigning the job beyond creating new languages that would reduce severely the number of programmers required...eliminating the entry level positions to start with.

Jobs that I feel would take longer are things like plumber, electrician, and, possibly, mechanic. Jobs that require creative intelligence mixed with a flexible body, etc.

Re:Why bother?

[HiThere]

I believe that that comment should be called, well, deplorable.

Re:Fewer jobs for more people

[HiThere]

We're already in that situation. There are lots of jobs that aren't actually necessary.

One problem is, *some* jobs are necessary, and if some people need to work, they resent it when others don't. And *nobody* is willing to admit that their job is one of the unnecessary ones...at least not when their boss is listening.

Re:They get it.

[greythax]

Oh, thank god! I was looking for a salient argument with analysis and references to assuage my fears, but now that I know only idiots believe this, I can rest easy!

Who the hell keeps modding up these trolls?

I don't know about bathroom remodeling

[rsilvergun]

but I did IT for a closet & cabinet maker where not a single employee (including the owner) could do carpentry. They had a CNC machine. A sales guy would go out, do measurements, show you some packages and then a computer cut everything to fit. Then a couple guys with nails and hammers went out and banged it all together. If anything didn't fit it was because the measurements were wrong. You didn't 'em again, recut, and yelled at the sales guy not to screw up again.

That's a really, really high skill job that's been turned into Ikea furniture by computers.

Another example is my kid's invisalign braces. After the first set of prints were done she saw the orthodontist a total of 6 times for about 3 hours total; and she only saw him that much because her teeth needed some grinding and that takes a while. Everything else was done by computer in Israel. The invisalign were the same price as regular braces; but the regular braces would have needed bi weekly adjustments. With the invisalign she just swapped out clear plastic retainers.

Oh, and don't get me started on how quick buildings go up now. I've seen high rises open in less than a year. The kind that used to take 5 times that when I was a wee lad. And most of that year was waiting for the city to complete inspections (underfunded inspection offices don't have enough manpower, so you wait a while).

Point is, it's not just automation, it's massive amounts of skill reduction.

Re:They get it.

[c]

That's why all of Trump's wives are immigrants.

Marla Maples isn't.

Granted, she might just be dumb.

Invitation to the Game

[Vasheron]

A book I read when I was young: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Prescient perhaps?

ArkShip B

[neoRUR]

Ok, Time to start building the Ark Fleet Ship B...

Re:It's time to create NEW jobs, not rehash old on

[jeff4747]

Why would any of those be done by humans instead of other robots?

One more thing I forgot to mention

[rsilvergun]

there was a story about coal miner's kids doing apprenticeships to be coal miners. Everyone called them idiots because they all know the job's going away. One of the left wing rags (I forget which one) actually _interviewed_ the kids. When asked the kids had a damn good reason to take the apprenticeships. There were no jobs available for the other career options available. They'd have to move somewhere else, and they didn't have the money to do that. These were poor kids in dead coal towns. Uprooting wasn't an option.

So they did the only rational thing: study for the only jobs left that weren't Walmart and hope they were one of the ones to get in. A perfectly rational thing to do under the circumstances. Trouble is the entire situation isn't rational, so if you're on the outside looking in they seem crazy.

Re:They get it.

[Rick Schumann]

WTF is that, some oblique accusation of a 'no true scottsman' fallacy?
We do not have true AI, we have 'expert systems' and 'learning algorithms' rebranded as 'AI' so they can sell the shit. IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY THINK. That's why it can't replace humans.

Re:They get it.

[Rick Schumann]

I'm tired of writing a goddamned novel every time I have to tell one of you fools you have no idea what you're talking about, that's why. And, you are fools. I have friends who work in the industry and have for a long time now, plus engineers, IT professionals, mathematicians, and so on ($SMART_PEOPLE) and we discuss this subject. That's why I know so-called 'AI' these days isn't 'replacing' everyones jobs. Also since historically tech advances always displace workers we see there are always new job descriptions that pop up to replace them. Human labor will never be obsolete. People who say otherwise are fools. /thread

Re:They get it.

[Rick Schumann]

If you want me to write you a goddamned novel to explain why, you can bloody well PAY ME to do so. Tired of doing it for free. So bugger off, not playing anymore.

Re:They get it.

[pipingguy]

Pre-CAD and computer modelling, you'd need one designer and three people making detail drawings of the designer's work.

Now, you need one designer and perhaps a CAD/IT support guy (who can support multiple designers) and the software outputs the detail drawings.

In this example, 75% of the technical, skilled people lost their jobs and are now unemployable in their field of specialty.

Not to mention that there are far fewer entry-level positions now because those entry-level tasks have been automated. More worrisome is that less-experienced and less-knowledgeable people are operating big sophisticated software. People these days are hired for their knowledge of the specific software used than they are hired for design skill, knowledge and experience.

And of course, off-shoring is rampant as well. People in high cost of living areas simply cannot compete with other people in low cost of living regions.

But strangely, the total cost for major projects doesn't seem to have declined that much (or not at all) and is sometimes higher due to costly errors.

Re: They get it.

[greythax]

Oh, pardon me, i didn't realize your pearls of wisdom were so valuable. I guess i should be thanking you for your pro bono original reply. As content free as it was.

Re: They get it.

[Rick Schumann]

Shove it up your uninformed troll ass.

Re:Fine.

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

SOUNDS cruel? Golly gee willikers, I wonder why??? What a load of internet-tough-guy gun-fetishist conservative crap. What really cleaned up the US from the hyperviolent times of the 70s and 80s was more stringent laws - you know, those protections that conservatives always whine like little babies about - that lowered the levels of lead in the environment (leaded gas, paint, etc). In specific locales in the US, time after time, as environmental lead levels dropped, crime rates fell right along with them. Take a look at the real facts and figures sometime, if you've got the courage, oh AC. You won't find anything like as close a relationship between crime rates and zero tolerance or mandatory minimum sentencing.

move over, smell

[epine]

They say that smell triggers memories. Move over smell, nothing takes me right back to the strike-riddled seventies than "job" and "hit" spiked into the same headline.

Post scarcity economy is incoming.

[Qbertino]

There is no two ways about that.

I'm a web-developer. Which these days means I fiddle with this mess called WordPress for which there are a bazillion plugins for every problem you can think of. I do 20hr/week part-time, earn more than quite a few people do full-time and my biggest challange is diving deep into Gulp and Sass if only for the kicks of it because that will be obsolete in two years too. My life now is basically an extended vacation, because aside from my 20 hours of "work" I indulge in post-scarcity "minimalism", which means I live in a single room appartment, with not too much junk in it but still an abundance of goods, gadgets, food and entertainment. I've picked up Yoga and dumbell training as to stay fit and as a special means of preparing for old age - I want to stay fit as long and possible. In my spare time I go social dancing, have sex and plan surf and snowboard trips and study media CS on the side. Most of my job is being available for when stuff happends which I then fix in a few hours. Roughly 70%. At least.

This is the model of life as it will be in the future from here on out.

Keynes profecy has come true. 15 per week and person max. required for luxury lifetimes. UBI will come, and if it's the megacorps drilling it into the head of the stupid Trumps of this world. Even high profile CEOs say it's inevitable. There simply is no other way. As soon as robots drive our cars and sew our clothing at minimum 200 - 300 million people are going to lose their job around the world and a good pair of jeans will still cost less than 10 euros and *won't* need shipping around the globe, because on demand local production will be cheaper . Yea, robot maintainence is a few extra jobs, but nowhere near what is going overboard. Add to that the loss of the ICE drivetrain with at least 100 000 high qualification jobs in Germany and Europe and the AIs doing the stuff I still do because the code I work with is from 20 years ago by people who couldn't programm, bound to be replaced within the next two major releases of whatever tool I'm currently using.

Bottom line:
Sit back, relax n chill and prepare for incoming.

Re:Post scarcity economy is incoming.

[RespekMyAthorati]

I'm a soon to be unemployed and desperate web-developer.

FTFY.

Re:Reskilling is horrible

[jezwel]

Hands-on care for the under aged and elderly. Obviously if you're male then don't bother with the childcare aspect - you simply won't be allowed to be near children unless the place has 24/7 CCTV. So look to elderly care.
Of course, if your country doesn't care that much for the elderly, perhaps you're SOL. If you're in the US, maybe prison guard. You incarcerate a lot of your population, and I doubt that's going to reduce anytime soon (well, unless you get you're War on Drugs under control).

Re:Time for the robot tax

[jezwel]

and the auto-shut-off kettle. And dishwasher, dryer, vacuum cleaner. Heck even the fridge used to be a basement with a block of ice brought down from the mountains didn't it?
Taxing robots is useless, and would require a heap of regulation.

Just keep your company taxes high...

Re:They get it.

[bingoUV]

Can submarines swim ?

Re:It's time to create NEW jobs, not rehash old on

[twosat]

Reminds me of these adverts that were on New Zealand TV years ago: Cannon Safety Inspector https://www.youtube.com/watch?... & Shopping Trolley Mechanic https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Reskilling is horrible

[Rande]

According to current scifi, mining virtual gold. You grind and grind and grind in VRMMO and come up with enough money to eat and sleep in a cubicle. Your room doesn't matter as you essentially live in VR.

In the long term, machines will cost nothing

[evanh]

Machines only have a price tag because it takes human labour to build them still. In other words, when there is no longer any human inputs then the cost drops to zero. Money is just a placeholder for cooperation.

The problem then becomes one of population control. There is two ways to do it without wars, either use discriminatory ways to decimate the "undesirables" or simply limit the birth rate.

Of course, there is also the problem of the combat capable machines. Who gets the tell them what to do? And at what level of accountability?

Re:In the long term, machines will cost nothing

[RespekMyAthorati]

In other words, when there is no longer any human inputs then the cost drops to zero. Money is just a placeholder for cooperation.

Like "cooperating" by buying land, building a robotic factory, paying for raw materials, etc. so that the factory can manufacture the things people need for free?

What kind of fantasy world do you live in?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Really? *What* new jobs?

[whitroth]

In the late seventies, as manufacturing was being sent to cheaper, non-union labor in other countries, we were told that better jobs would come from the "information economy".

I skimmed the article... and they simply do not mention what the "growing job categories" are.

It's all magic, they say, we'll wave our hands, and move on.

Meanwhile, the folks who's jobs, or whose parents jobs, were outsourced and offshored do *not* have been jobs. The mechanic who works for a dealer, and has to buy his own
"special service tools" every year, does *not* make as much as a unionized factory worker did, nor do they have a pension, or a union hall to go to, where they can get jobs.

And remember, nearly 50% of the US has *no* college. And a lot of them would not be happy in college (really? how much did you enjoy the flunk-out courses?).

A guaranteed basic income is the only way to deal with too many people, and fewer and fewer jobs. They could be paid for by dividends (aka "taxes") from the megacorps making tens of billions a year... in profits.

Re:They get it.

[david_thornley]

And, fortunately, things always happen the way they've happened in the past. Right.

Human labor doesn't have to become obsolete in order for displacement to be a big problem. We've been continuing to automate away low-skilled jobs. If the economy is thriving without providing enough low-skill jobs for the low-skill people (and we'll always have those), we've got a problem.

Re:Fewer jobs for more people

[david_thornley]

Provide incentives to work. I haven't seen any UBI proposal with an income I'm willing to live on, and I have a choice here. I can work at a fairly high-paying job and get more money than I really want to live on.

Just because we need some people working doesn't mean we need some specific people to be working. This isn't slavery.

Re:Reskilling is horrible

[RespekMyAthorati]

It's going to change, and I strongly suspect that questions like "what fields should we reskill workers into?" are going to sound ridiculous a generation or two down the line.

Nice fantasy. Too bad the wealthy and powerful have ultimate power and no interest in sharing it.