Locksmiths are probably one of the last manual tasks to be fully automated, for precisely those reasons. Any job that involves an individual worker going to a customer site is likely to be one of the last jobs to become automated, with the exception of deliveries (because as soon as self-driving cars are on the roads, you'll be able to immediately replace twenty delivery truck drivers with a single robot operator in a call center).
That said, automation has already had a real impact on locksmith jobs. Fifteen years ago, to make a copy of a key, you would take it to a store and someone would put it into a grinder and make a copy. These days, you go into your local Home Depot, Lowe's, or Walmart and stick your key and credit card into a machine, and a minute later, you have a copy without human intervention.
Actually, I did forget one category of jobs: Law Enforcement. I don't see that realistically becoming automated for a long time to come. It might happen eventually, but it's the stuff of pure sci-fi at this point.
It is definitely not 2 years, nor is it 100 years. The general consensus, from what I've read, is on the order of 10 years in most industries, with 20 years as a best-case scenario. That's short enough to cause serious pain for a lot of people (and short enough that it's probably a very bad idea to choose any of those areas as a career if you're just getting out of school today), but probably not short enough to bring about another Peasants' Revolt or world war.
That's quite a story. Why should anyone believe it?
Because it is self-evident.
Do you have economic models? Do you have population models? What's the ROI on whatever equipment you've decided will somehow be invented? You know businesses care about ROI, right?
At a macroeconomic level, ROI is meaningless. ROI tells you whether a specific robot in a specific industry makes sense right now. You can't model that more broadly because the cost of every robot is different, and because the cost of technology is continually decreasing, making any model based on current ROI a fundamentally worthless model, and any model based on projected ROI too complex to realistically be correct over more than a very short-term period, because improvements in tech are unpredictable by their very nature. Something can be impossible one day and trivially possible the next.
The best we can really do is look at overall trends. The cost of automation is coming down, and machine learning and computer vision are becoming advanced enough to make a lot of things practical that weren't practical before. This means that a lot of jobs are much more plausibly automated than they were even a few years ago. And the costs are trending downward fairly rapidly. There are already kiosks out there that can make coffee, make and bake pizzas, paint your nails, etc. without any humans involved at all (beyond periodically restocking the machines). These things aren't ten years out or twenty or fifty. They're available right now, and people are deploying them because the ROI of those machines is good enough that buying them makes sense.
Now I'm not saying that in a year, all manual labor will suddenly cease to have jobs. It isn't like that. Obviously such changes happen over a long period of time. The point is that we're seeing it happening all around us, and pretending that the number of jobs created will somehow magically exceed the number of jobs destroyed is pretty silly. At some point, we have to look at the new reality with a clear head and figure out what we're going to do with all these people whose skills are no longer worth minimum wage when compared with what robots cost, and how we will feed them, clothe them, shelter them, etc.
You know people often want things that aren't cheap mass-produced commodity items, right?
For the right price, this would mostly be easy (ignoring the toilet clogging and sink clogging problem, anyway). You start out with a power washer and mount it to an arm on the ceiling. Then you put a drain in the floor. Then you wait until the bathroom is empty... or not, if you're really feeling evil.:-D
What makes you think we won't have fully software-based doctors, surgeons, and nurses? The field is basically just a combination of physical labor plus data analysis, both of which technology is capable of doing (potentially better than people, because of access to more information than a human can practically know).
And social services? The first one to go will be meal delivery for the elderly. After all, that's little more than a self-driving car plus a robot that can climb stairs and ring a doorbell. A human would remotely pilot the thing to the door once.
Robots are already doing washing and shaving. It's just a matter of time.
What about locksmith or carpet installer or piano mover? Construction?
I'm missing your point here. In time, all of these things will be automated. There's no reason a lock can't be swapped out by a robot. It just hasn't been done yet (that I know of). And there's no reason that a robot can't zip around a floor surface, take measurements, and cut a rug to fit, then lay it down with a level of precision that far exceeds what humans are capable of; it probably isn't cost-effective yet, but it is only a matter of time. And some aspects of construction are already being automated.
I feel like there's a lot you're missing.
Nope. I'm really not. Anything that doesn't require creativity can be automated, and the only thing preventing it from happening is that it currently costs more to automate some jobs than to have a person do them. As the cost of automation drops, more and more things will become automated. Anybody who thinks that any kind of physical labor will remain a viable career in the long term is kidding him/herself. The only interesting question is when any given industry will reach that tipping point. Most of the jobs you list are likely to still exist for a while, mainly because barbers tend to own their hair salons and manicurists tend to own their nail salons, and most people don't want to put themselves out of a job. But that only slows the conversion to automation; it does not stop it.
Ozone diffuses very rapidly in air. Outdoors, it would be surprising if any effect were localized near the wires (as opposed to, for example, in an entire city basin), and even if it were, the effect still would be weighted towards downwind, which would be easily seen in the data, I would think.
Not necessarily. If food is faster, it might make it more likely for some people who might otherwise keep lunch meats in their refrigerators and a loaf of bread on their countertop.
But in practice, yes, it probably does. And of course the next step is to automate the making of the sandwiches, at which point there won't be a human in the place other than maybe the person who cleans the tables and bathrooms (and only until they perfect the self-busing table). At that point, the destruction of those low-end jobs becomes near-total. In the long term, the only jobs available for humans will be:
Creative
Government
Military
Sports
Entertainment
Escort services and similar
People who manage the aforementioned groups
That's about it. I might have left out a few things, but that's about it.
The good news is that this will take longer than most people think. As those displaced workers enter the job market, there will be more people willing to do various jobs, which will bring down the cost of that labor to the minimum wage and make automation much less attractive.
The bad news is that automation will indirectly decrease the number of non-minimum-wage jobs by turning them into minimum-wage jobs.
Actually, the data was probably skewed by people's faulty memory of which ear they used. People with a history of cancer assumed that a correlation must exist and therefore said that they used it more on the side where they had previously gotten cancer. To be valid, you would need to ask that question *before* they got cancer.
It isn't any of those things. People who live near power lines tend to be poor, and poverty is correlated with higher cancer rates. When you correct for income differences, the correlation goes away.
Maybe when ANY servers are deleted, even just one, there should be two or more people who look at the command before it is entered. Just to have more than one pair of eyes on it. Just to greatly reduce the chances of doing something you don't want to do. Sort of like, if you did the rm -rf \ thing. Make sure another person looks at it first. Seems like a simple rule for certain powerful commands where the user's powers include enough scope to accidentally do a lot of damage.
The problem started way before the admin entered the command. The root cause is that you can do this by entering a command in the first place. This sort of thing should be part of a change-controlled configuration management system, and the change should be reviewed before it gets rolled out, it should be rolled out on a staged basis to a single cluster, and it should get rolled back if it breaks things.
Hardly. Lots of low-quality ad services serve those crapware ads. And sites that don't have lots of traffic can't get access to any of the decent ad services because they don't qualify. The result is that every small site has to choose between no ads or that garbage. I tried enabling third-party advertising on my website. The experiment lasted exactly ten seconds until I got the first ad. Now, apart from individually vetted Amazon ads, I don't touch third-party advertising. The quality is just way too low unless you're a big site.
Short of going there and doing a one shot one kill of you-know-you I don't think we'll ever be able to fix that Texas shithole. Maybe instead of building a wall how about we gift Texas to the Mexicans ?
How about just ceding the courthouse in Tyler and a one block radius around it. Then build a wall around it like West Berlin. Better yet, forget ceding the one block around it... and the courthouse. Just build the wall around it.
There's no reason they couldn't support that feature over a 3.5mm jack. Trivially. Upon detecting the plug event, you send a low voltage (not enough to damage the drivers) on both outputs and wait a fraction of a second. The headphones have a circuit designed to recognize that power and send back a data burst over the same wires to indicates that the headphones support that feature. If the phone doesn't detect the response, it disables the power to the jack. If it does, it knows that the headphones will use the DC bias for power, and it keeps it active. Aaaaand you're done.
Yes, but when you have an API that is known to be fundamentally insecure, keeping it around for more than a decade solely to preserve code compatibility is generally a really bad idea that can only encourage the proliferation of dangerous code copied from other dangerous code. The assumption was that PHP 5 would be replaced by a new major version that broke backwards compatibility after just a couple of years, but instead it took eleven.
The problem is that they look good until the economy tumbles and you get caught in that round of layoffs. You're taking a big risk by taking out an ARM unless you're either in a stable enough financial position that you don't really need the money, in which case one might reasonably ask why you'd take out the mortgage in the first place, not to mention why you didn't just get a fixed-rate mortgage with a shorter term.
The main reason for an ARM is so that if you know you're in a position to pay a lot of money quickly but might not continue to be able to do so, you can prepay to lower your payments over the term of the loan, rather than your prepayments shortening the term of the loan. Whether this is or isn't a benefit depends on whether you can guarantee that you'll be able to afford those lowered payments forever or not. If you can, though, arguably you didn't really need the loan in the first place.
Actually, to some degree, PHP is the issue. PHP has supported ways of performing MySQL queries that use placeholders for many years, but they also resisted breaking existing code by ripping out the old interfaces for way longer than made sense. Note that in PHP 7, they finally removed them, so we should start to see PHP app security improve dramatically as panicked admins realize that they have to replace all this crappy code.
Actually, the rule was that they had to be micro-USB. To comply with that law, Apple shipped a micro-USB to Lightning adapter in every product sold in Europe, at least initially. I'm not sure if they still do.
Oh no! All the people whose job description is to be 6 feet tall, to lift 100 pounds, to jump 4feet into the air and to be able to travel at 9 miles per hour are no longer economically viable...
Teach it to shoot baskets and you've got yourself a real money saver.
You forgot to mention the occasional random forklift holes all the way through double-boxed packages delivered by UPS, but otherwise, yes, that pretty much matches my experience.:-)
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Locksmiths are probably one of the last manual tasks to be fully automated, for precisely those reasons. Any job that involves an individual worker going to a customer site is likely to be one of the last jobs to become automated, with the exception of deliveries (because as soon as self-driving cars are on the roads, you'll be able to immediately replace twenty delivery truck drivers with a single robot operator in a call center).
That said, automation has already had a real impact on locksmith jobs. Fifteen years ago, to make a copy of a key, you would take it to a store and someone would put it into a grinder and make a copy. These days, you go into your local Home Depot, Lowe's, or Walmart and stick your key and credit card into a machine, and a minute later, you have a copy without human intervention.
Actually, I did forget one category of jobs: Law Enforcement. I don't see that realistically becoming automated for a long time to come. It might happen eventually, but it's the stuff of pure sci-fi at this point.
It is definitely not 2 years, nor is it 100 years. The general consensus, from what I've read, is on the order of 10 years in most industries, with 20 years as a best-case scenario. That's short enough to cause serious pain for a lot of people (and short enough that it's probably a very bad idea to choose any of those areas as a career if you're just getting out of school today), but probably not short enough to bring about another Peasants' Revolt or world war.
Because it is self-evident.
At a macroeconomic level, ROI is meaningless. ROI tells you whether a specific robot in a specific industry makes sense right now. You can't model that more broadly because the cost of every robot is different, and because the cost of technology is continually decreasing, making any model based on current ROI a fundamentally worthless model, and any model based on projected ROI too complex to realistically be correct over more than a very short-term period, because improvements in tech are unpredictable by their very nature. Something can be impossible one day and trivially possible the next.
The best we can really do is look at overall trends. The cost of automation is coming down, and machine learning and computer vision are becoming advanced enough to make a lot of things practical that weren't practical before. This means that a lot of jobs are much more plausibly automated than they were even a few years ago. And the costs are trending downward fairly rapidly. There are already kiosks out there that can make coffee, make and bake pizzas, paint your nails, etc. without any humans involved at all (beyond periodically restocking the machines). These things aren't ten years out or twenty or fifty. They're available right now, and people are deploying them because the ROI of those machines is good enough that buying them makes sense.
Now I'm not saying that in a year, all manual labor will suddenly cease to have jobs. It isn't like that. Obviously such changes happen over a long period of time. The point is that we're seeing it happening all around us, and pretending that the number of jobs created will somehow magically exceed the number of jobs destroyed is pretty silly. At some point, we have to look at the new reality with a clear head and figure out what we're going to do with all these people whose skills are no longer worth minimum wage when compared with what robots cost, and how we will feed them, clothe them, shelter them, etc.
I covered that under "Creative".
For the right price, this would mostly be easy (ignoring the toilet clogging and sink clogging problem, anyway). You start out with a power washer and mount it to an arm on the ceiling. Then you put a drain in the floor. Then you wait until the bathroom is empty... or not, if you're really feeling evil. :-D
What makes you think we won't have fully software-based doctors, surgeons, and nurses? The field is basically just a combination of physical labor plus data analysis, both of which technology is capable of doing (potentially better than people, because of access to more information than a human can practically know).
And social services? The first one to go will be meal delivery for the elderly. After all, that's little more than a self-driving car plus a robot that can climb stairs and ring a doorbell. A human would remotely pilot the thing to the door once.
In order:
Already replaced by robots in some places
Robots are already doing washing and shaving. It's just a matter of time.
I'm missing your point here. In time, all of these things will be automated. There's no reason a lock can't be swapped out by a robot. It just hasn't been done yet (that I know of). And there's no reason that a robot can't zip around a floor surface, take measurements, and cut a rug to fit, then lay it down with a level of precision that far exceeds what humans are capable of; it probably isn't cost-effective yet, but it is only a matter of time. And some aspects of construction are already being automated.
Nope. I'm really not. Anything that doesn't require creativity can be automated, and the only thing preventing it from happening is that it currently costs more to automate some jobs than to have a person do them. As the cost of automation drops, more and more things will become automated. Anybody who thinks that any kind of physical labor will remain a viable career in the long term is kidding him/herself. The only interesting question is when any given industry will reach that tipping point. Most of the jobs you list are likely to still exist for a while, mainly because barbers tend to own their hair salons and manicurists tend to own their nail salons, and most people don't want to put themselves out of a job. But that only slows the conversion to automation; it does not stop it.
Ozone diffuses very rapidly in air. Outdoors, it would be surprising if any effect were localized near the wires (as opposed to, for example, in an entire city basin), and even if it were, the effect still would be weighted towards downwind, which would be easily seen in the data, I would think.
Not necessarily. If food is faster, it might make it more likely for some people who might otherwise keep lunch meats in their refrigerators and a loaf of bread on their countertop.
But in practice, yes, it probably does. And of course the next step is to automate the making of the sandwiches, at which point there won't be a human in the place other than maybe the person who cleans the tables and bathrooms (and only until they perfect the self-busing table). At that point, the destruction of those low-end jobs becomes near-total. In the long term, the only jobs available for humans will be:
That's about it. I might have left out a few things, but that's about it.
The good news is that this will take longer than most people think. As those displaced workers enter the job market, there will be more people willing to do various jobs, which will bring down the cost of that labor to the minimum wage and make automation much less attractive.
The bad news is that automation will indirectly decrease the number of non-minimum-wage jobs by turning them into minimum-wage jobs.
Newt: The moon is made of cheese.
Woman: My a** it is.
Maybe I've been on the Internet too long, but I fully expected that to go off the rails in the third line, e.g.
Newt: Your a** is made of cheese? So I guess you're telling me I can bite your a**.
Actually, the data was probably skewed by people's faulty memory of which ear they used. People with a history of cancer assumed that a correlation must exist and therefore said that they used it more on the side where they had previously gotten cancer. To be valid, you would need to ask that question *before* they got cancer.
It isn't any of those things. People who live near power lines tend to be poor, and poverty is correlated with higher cancer rates. When you correct for income differences, the correlation goes away.
Nah. They're deaf. This also means that they have to learn through their eyes. Fortunately, they're well-red.
... stealing a cade of herrings?
The problem started way before the admin entered the command. The root cause is that you can do this by entering a command in the first place. This sort of thing should be part of a change-controlled configuration management system, and the change should be reviewed before it gets rolled out, it should be rolled out on a staged basis to a single cluster, and it should get rolled back if it breaks things.
Hardly. Lots of low-quality ad services serve those crapware ads. And sites that don't have lots of traffic can't get access to any of the decent ad services because they don't qualify. The result is that every small site has to choose between no ads or that garbage. I tried enabling third-party advertising on my website. The experiment lasted exactly ten seconds until I got the first ad. Now, apart from individually vetted Amazon ads, I don't touch third-party advertising. The quality is just way too low unless you're a big site.
How about just ceding the courthouse in Tyler and a one block radius around it. Then build a wall around it like West Berlin. Better yet, forget ceding the one block around it... and the courthouse. Just build the wall around it.
There's no reason they couldn't support that feature over a 3.5mm jack. Trivially. Upon detecting the plug event, you send a low voltage (not enough to damage the drivers) on both outputs and wait a fraction of a second. The headphones have a circuit designed to recognize that power and send back a data burst over the same wires to indicates that the headphones support that feature. If the phone doesn't detect the response, it disables the power to the jack. If it does, it knows that the headphones will use the DC bias for power, and it keeps it active. Aaaaand you're done.
Yes, but when you have an API that is known to be fundamentally insecure, keeping it around for more than a decade solely to preserve code compatibility is generally a really bad idea that can only encourage the proliferation of dangerous code copied from other dangerous code. The assumption was that PHP 5 would be replaced by a new major version that broke backwards compatibility after just a couple of years, but instead it took eleven.
The problem is that they look good until the economy tumbles and you get caught in that round of layoffs. You're taking a big risk by taking out an ARM unless you're either in a stable enough financial position that you don't really need the money, in which case one might reasonably ask why you'd take out the mortgage in the first place, not to mention why you didn't just get a fixed-rate mortgage with a shorter term.
The main reason for an ARM is so that if you know you're in a position to pay a lot of money quickly but might not continue to be able to do so, you can prepay to lower your payments over the term of the loan, rather than your prepayments shortening the term of the loan. Whether this is or isn't a benefit depends on whether you can guarantee that you'll be able to afford those lowered payments forever or not. If you can, though, arguably you didn't really need the loan in the first place.
Actually, to some degree, PHP is the issue. PHP has supported ways of performing MySQL queries that use placeholders for many years, but they also resisted breaking existing code by ripping out the old interfaces for way longer than made sense. Note that in PHP 7, they finally removed them, so we should start to see PHP app security improve dramatically as panicked admins realize that they have to replace all this crappy code.
Actually, the rule was that they had to be micro-USB. To comply with that law, Apple shipped a micro-USB to Lightning adapter in every product sold in Europe, at least initially. I'm not sure if they still do.
Teach it to shoot baskets and you've got yourself a real money saver.
<sarcasm>Five hours of commuting and half a grand to save only a little over half a grand in rent.... Where do I sign up?</sarcasm>
It really is that simple. You just have to tolerate a 2–3 hour commute from Elk Grove. The question is this: How much is your time worth?
You forgot to mention the occasional random forklift holes all the way through double-boxed packages delivered by UPS, but otherwise, yes, that pretty much matches my experience. :-)