Actually, I think they are. Different people definitely have different skill sets, and these don't seem to be freely interchangable. E.g., I've never mastered elegant longhand, and I've tried for decades (admittedly, recently my attempts have been quite sporadic). I also lack the ability to recognize people after meeting them once, and many people seem to have that ability.
Additionally, while I can, if I exert myself, create quite good artistic renderings of natural objects, and can't *enjoy* doing that. And I'm not particularly creative, as I exert my skills in creating a "sufficiently close illusion". I'm also not *really* good at naturalistic illustration, as I observed by watching someone who was good at the illustration produce a work in a day that I couldn't have produced no matter how long I worked at it. But I'm a much better than average programmer. (Again, by no means in the genius class.)
Then again, I'm a lousy personnel manager. I'm much too hands off, and can't bring myself to supervise. This is all right when the other person is self-motivated, but when they aren't I don't notice. And again, I don't seem to be able to develop this skill.
One could argue nature vs. nurture, but it doesn't really matter. It could be nurture, but it's fixed.
Well, FWIW, in the city in which I live one of the more common crimes is assaulting someone walking down the street using an iPad and stealing it. Whether they usually use it themselves or resell it I don't know. Nor to I know the blackmarket price of an iPad.
How large a garden? How is it arranged? When he's not feeling well, can it survive his not tending it? Does he need to drive to get to it?
Perhaps you need to think a bit more carefully. Being a commercial scale gardener is hard work. Growing a few tomatoes, carrots, onions, cucumbers, squash, etc. is easy. Especially if you get someone to make you raised beds.
(Mind you, I have my doubts as to it's economic benefits. Unless the water is free. When my father checked, he figured we were spending more for water than it would cost to purchase the produce we used.)
Not to mention that even if it yields a desireable end point, the transition can be very rough. The reason the Luddites got violent is that al lot of them were starving. Many of them died. Saying "The next generation will have things better." isn't very convincing when your kids are dying.
You are right, we need a change, but it's got to include supporting those who don't benefit from the productivity increases.
My suspicion is that you are underestimating the degree of progress that's been happening in automation. I'm fairly certain you are underestimating the degree of progress that will happen. And building factories like this is a part of that progress. One reason Apple is probably doing it is to improve their ability to build automated factories.
One other thing you've got to have on that list to make it work long-term is free birth-control. Actually, even that won't suffice, but it will help. It really needs to be something more along the lines of the plan enacted by China.
OTOH, that's long term, and things will change so radically within the next 50 years, that planning for the long term may be unreasonable.
P.S.: Full employment with a living wage for everyone *IS* possible. But the social policies required to cause it to happen are quite unlikely. NOBODY has been proposing them. They would include not only measures to reduce the amount of a "living wage", but inducements for employers to employ more people. And positive penalties for not being employed. And automation would still eliminate jobs, it just wouldn't reduce employment. P.P.S.: Note that I don't consider that kind of social policy desireable. It would give those defined as employers too much control. I don't *like* giving the government that much control, but I see no way to avoid it. To also give that much control to employers is *really* repugnant.
Perhaps some do. It's also true that many such people get the kind of health care that kills them. E.g., diabetics denied insulin. (It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens, and there aren't repercussions. After all, it's hard to *prove* malice, when all the witnesses can't or won't testify. And people in jail rarely have external support that can and will afford lawyers...and THOSE people don't get the same treatment.)
You need either people or better automated systems than we currently have.
You probably assumed this, but many of the readers seem to be presuming that the current state of the art will continue to be the state of the art. (Either that, or you think our current systems are a lot more advanced than they actually are.)
Shortening of the work week isn't even a good short term solution, except for commodity jobs.
Please note that which jobs are needed will be continually varying, and not in a monotonically decreasing fashion, but currently lots of specialty jobs aren't fillable by sufficiently skilled people, wereas many unskilled jobs have a superabundance of qualified people. Which jobs fit into which category changes with each change in automation, but there will always be, until near the end, some jobs for which there aren't enough skilled people, even at 60 hours a week. And working that long degrades the skills of the worker. For highly skilled worker, coerced working of over 35 hours/week degrades the skills (though inspiration may strike, and even 70 hours/week then isn't too much).
OTOH, the basic jobs need to be done, and for those a shorter work week is a reasonable solution...but only if it provides a reasibale living wage. And be aware that as automation progresses, more and more jobs will fall into this "basic" category, where there are more qualified practitioners than there are jobs available. Also consider that if commuting is involved, short work days are highly unfavorable. But if two people share the same work space at different times, this causes it's own problems. 30 hours/week if reasonable for many desk jobs, if one divides it into 3 8-hour days and one 4-hour day. That allows two people to share the same work-space at half a week each. IF there are enough of that kind of job. Which will be a time-varying function.
Note also that this makes pensions problematic. Since the amount of work needed is time varying, lots of people preparing of a job currently in high need can expect that after only a few years, they won't be needed. Whoops! Who pays for the preparation? It was *needed* at the time they prepared, but in just a few years it has become obsolete. This makes a large investment unreasonable. But highly trained people are needed, and will be needed. You just can predict exactly which skills will be needed for how long. What happens when an automated brain surgeon hits the market? It took multiple decades and multiple thousands of dollars for the current experts to develop their skills, Some are transferable to related specialties, but by no means all, and guess what... the same transfer of skills is happening in the robot surgeon designers, and fewer of their skill have changed. So by the time the surgeon finishes preparing for his new specialty, it's already obsolete.
Do you think this projection is fantastic? But currently brain surgeons are working through telefactors which note every move they make, and eliminate slips and nervous twitches. Otherwise brain surgery would be much less safe. And they RECORD what is done. So any AI that can extract those patterns could repeat the operation. Currently they aren't good enough to decide when to do which action, and the proper language isn't shared by the robots and the doctors to allow the surgeon to say sever the _ghjklh_ and then rejoin the pieces with a _9opikl_ inserted between them to limit spiking. But it will be. And then the next higher level of patterns will need to be learned. And the next. It will take awhile, but the process has already been started.
One reason that prices in such things stay high is because of vandalism and maintenance. As those problems are handled, prices will drop until they compete effectively with non-automated businesses. Then the prices will stop dropping. This is known as "all the market will bear".
But do notice that you can't buy a head of lettuce from such a machine. Not this year. Not unless it's carefully pre-packaged, and even then only from a specialty machine that dispenses refridgerated items. This isn't even a prototype of an automated convenience store, which will probably be a merger between an automated warehouse and an automated teller, but with a full keyboard AND a speech recognition input. It won't be an expansion of the automated sandwich machines.
P.S.: Note I said expect. This time scale is definitely not dependable. It probably won't get to that point in less than 20 years. I'd be surprised if it took 40 years. 30 is a reasonable best guess. But we need to be prepared for it happening in 20 years, so that's what we should expect.
There are NO jobs that can't be automated. NONE. Not one.
If you spend 15 years learning to follow a profession, you can expect that by the time you've finished learning, the profession is obsolete.
Now there will be jobs that won't easily be replaced by a robot...though you might be surprised. To take one of your examples, a human bartender will be a rarity, and only seen in high priced clubs, unless there is a legal requirement, or he's the owner. But that's not in the next 5 years. More likely 15, though possibly 10.
Everything depends on the time scale at which you look at things. You won't see bus drivers replaced in the next 5 years, but you might see them replaced in 10 years.
There's already a "robot" in Japan that frequently fools people into thinking it's human...and it has NO intelligence at all, and can't move away from the desk. It's just a torso attached to a desk, but it looks totally human, even to the extent of breathing naturally. This was 5-10 years ago. I'm not sure that particular "robot" is even a telefactor, i.e., I'm not sure it has the capability of remote control. It was one of several academic experiments. (Note that I said "several". I only know of a very few, of course. But I only hear about those that news reporters find worth mentioning.)
In 20 years we should expect that the only jobs held by humans exist for non-economic reasons, like legal requirements, or power vested by law (as, e.g., the owner of a bar).
What time scale are you thinking on? For 5 years you're practically certain to be correct. For 10 years, you should expect to see major changes. For 15 years, the number of mechanical engineers needed will be drastically reduced, and only the highly skilled need apply. For 20 years, the number of mechanical engineers needed has be yet more drastically reduced, and the employers are screaming because they can't find enough sufficiently talented people. For 25 years, no new mechanical engineers are being hired. Current ones are being encouraged to retire. For 30 years, there is no need for a human in that profession.
Perhaps my time table is a bit off...but probably mainly by being too regular. I wouldn't bet whether it was fast or slow.
I think you are either very optimistic, or operating on a very short time frame. Unemployment is already over 20%...though how much over is impossible to determine, due to the way the statistics are finagled.
I expect that it will hit 50% unemployment within the decade. 75% soon afterwards. The final several percent will hold onto their jobs because of "social engineering" skills. E.g., top management is unlikely to decide to replace itself....though they may arrange that they have no replacement. I.e., it's quite likely that totally automated corporations will arrise because top management has either died off or lost interest in holding on. The first such should show up within the decade. It will probably fail, but in doing so solve many of the problems that such a system creates for itself. The second or third will probably succeed.
And some jobs will hang on because they are legally required. BART trains have train operators because they are legally required to. The system could be run, probably more efficiently, as a totally automated system. Not only today, but a decade ago. (Well, by totally automated here I'm not including maintenance, etc. I'm talking about the job of train operator.)
P.S.: Have you noticed the decrease in the number of grocery checkout clerks? Many of the registers are clusters overseen by one clerk. Sometimes jobs get eliminated by redesigning what the job consists of. But they still get redesigned to eliminate jobs or increase production...and in the limit this means all jobs are eliminated, though not this year.
My expectation is that within 50 years there will be no job that could not be done better by a robot, or possibly by a computer. 75 years would surprise me. This doesn't mean that all jobs will be eliminated, but rather that there will be no ECONOMIC reason for the jobs to exist.
You have a good point. Socially important services should not be dependent upon holding a job. Health care is a socially important service, so a high basic level of health care should be available to everyone, without question. (Note that I did NOT say "all citizens". Public health depends on everyone being healthy. Sick people spread sickness.)
Dense populations have different requirements than diffusely spread populations. Until around 1900, most people lived in the country-side, and we still haven't psychologically adjusted to the changes required by the changed circumstances. Our (i.e., the U.S.'s) current social policies seem determined to reduce the population by the reintroduction of various plagues. Several that had previously been nearly wiped out have already reappeared. Whooping cough is just the most recent that I've noticed. I'm sorry, but parents should NOT be allowed to refuse to have the children that they send to school vaccinated, and they MUST make provision for the children to be educated. Etc.
Of course, there are many thousands of people still involved in the production of these devices. Final assembly is just one small part of what it takes to get an iPhone from inside a human brain, all the way to store shelves.
The workers that are being replaced aren't imaginary, they work for FoxConn in China...or something analogous. Most of your other points seem valid, if parochial. But it's not at all clear how this contributes to what you correctly identify as a "largely political matter". There isn't an obvious natural limit to "how rich" and individual can be, as there is to "how poor" he can be. And the extremely rich in the US are already so extremely much richer than ther poor, that there's no clear reason for not acting NOW to decrease the disparity. This kind of great disparity is dangerous to democratic governments...if not as dangerous as allowing corporations to be considered to be people. (But note that it's only dangerous to allow corporations to be considered people because they are rich. If they were no richer than the average citizen, then they would constitute no danger...unless, of course, you go full bore and grant them the vote.)
Thanks for understanding my point. I *do* know about Python's multiprocessing modules, but they aren't easy to use. Which is why I'm currently developing in D, despite Python having *MUCH* better libraries. D has a mode of parallelism where I can just say "execute this loop a parallel as you can". (Well, naturally it's a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the essence. I'm stepping through an array and each step is intended to be compatible with changes made by any other. So using numPy isn't the answer, or it doesn't appear to be from what I've read. I'd need to be calling back from numPy into Python all the time. And the Python parallel modes don't appear to do what I want either. A good message passing framework that didn't care what processor the destination was on would be good. A nice dataflow system would be good...but they don't seems to have developed. Probably because they showed up too early, and now they aren't fashionable anymore. But independent processes or threads aren't a good model for what I'm attempting.)
Of course, what I'd really like is a good Python compiler with a strong message-passing module, or possibly a strong dataflow module, that had a better documentation system than Doxygen. (Here, and for me, better means that it uses less screen space to display the documentation. This probably means a system that pops up windows in response to a click on a menu rather than using html. I've seen applications that do it, though, so it's not a pure pipe-dream. Both Qt and wxWidgets can handle this kind of application. Gtk used to be able to, but I'm not sure that it can anymore. OTOH, I'm not at all sure that tcl/tk can handle it. Perhaps I just never got deeply enough into it.) (Note that Sphinx seems to not be a step in the right direction.)
There have already been court decisions that say, essentially, that if something can be observed, even using rarely available technical means, from outside your property, that it counts as publicly available information. This has been used to convict people of indecent exposure who went swimming in the nude in their private pool behind a high opaque fence. (IIRC, the camera was mounted on a blimp.)
I don't know that that decision would hold up on appeal, but I sure don't know that it wouldn't.
While the reason against coerced confessions are as you state, I'm not really convinced that it was entirely for the benefit of an honest trial. Remember, the people who set things up had just revolted against an oppressive government, and many of them didn't have that much trust in the one they were setting up. So they wanted to ensure that a successful revolution would remain possible.
I'd say they did a fair job, but not a great one. Understandably, as entrenched power will always reinterpret any existing rules in it's own favor.
What you say was true the last time I checked in North Dakota, and on family farms in California (NOT on neighbor's farms, or the public roads).
I suppose that there are various other conditions in different states where it is also true. It is not true in general. Perhaps you are asserting that it *should* be true in general, but don't mistake that arguable belief for the existing state of affairs.
The public version doesn't seem to be improving very rapidly. That said, there are lots of good things about it (though I don't include the documentation).
I do, however, disagree with Guido's statement that "Python is fast enough". Whether it is or not depends entirely on what you're doing. For my purposes I don't think a 12-core computer optimally programmed in assembler would be "fast enough".
It's faster to write code in Python than in C or C++ or Pascal or Java. But Python isn't "fast enough" unless your program is I/O bound. And it's inability to handle multiple processing uints gracefully is a real problem. (Not that anyone has a decent answer to that except the dataflow people and the pure functional language people.) Multiple core machines are now the rule rather than the exception, so the GIL is no longer acceptable. Even Ruby attempts to address that, though they didn't really follow through after considering their library situation.
Another real problem that I have with Python is it's documentation system. (Again, nobody has a good answer.) The "built-in" documentation system is so bad that I prefer to use Doxygen, which itself isn't great. It's better than Epydoc, but barely. They need a much better system for generating html...one that doesn't create huge amounts of blank space. (Actually, they have a better system, but it only works to generate PDFs.) I know that I could customize it, but I also don't want to spend all my time fiddling with CSS. N.B.: I've only got one screen and it's not huge, so large blank spaces in the generated documentation are just not acceptable. I need to fit both the current documentation, and the code I'm working with on my screen, and frequently a few other references as well. So the documentation within the code needs to be compact, and so does the generated html display. BOTH
Perhaps it's unfair to pick on Python for problems that nobody has really solved, but it needs to be said over and over until somebody figures out a decent fix.
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Actually, I think they are. Different people definitely have different skill sets, and these don't seem to be freely interchangable. E.g., I've never mastered elegant longhand, and I've tried for decades (admittedly, recently my attempts have been quite sporadic). I also lack the ability to recognize people after meeting them once, and many people seem to have that ability.
Additionally, while I can, if I exert myself, create quite good artistic renderings of natural objects, and can't *enjoy* doing that. And I'm not particularly creative, as I exert my skills in creating a "sufficiently close illusion". I'm also not *really* good at naturalistic illustration, as I observed by watching someone who was good at the illustration produce a work in a day that I couldn't have produced no matter how long I worked at it. But I'm a much better than average programmer. (Again, by no means in the genius class.)
Then again, I'm a lousy personnel manager. I'm much too hands off, and can't bring myself to supervise. This is all right when the other person is self-motivated, but when they aren't I don't notice. And again, I don't seem to be able to develop this skill.
One could argue nature vs. nurture, but it doesn't really matter. It could be nurture, but it's fixed.
Well, FWIW, in the city in which I live one of the more common crimes is assaulting someone walking down the street using an iPad and stealing it. Whether they usually use it themselves or resell it I don't know. Nor to I know the blackmarket price of an iPad.
How large a garden? How is it arranged? When he's not feeling well, can it survive his not tending it? Does he need to drive to get to it?
Perhaps you need to think a bit more carefully. Being a commercial scale gardener is hard work. Growing a few tomatoes, carrots, onions, cucumbers, squash, etc. is easy. Especially if you get someone to make you raised beds.
(Mind you, I have my doubts as to it's economic benefits. Unless the water is free. When my father checked, he figured we were spending more for water than it would cost to purchase the produce we used.)
The price of techie goodies has gone down. The price of food and shelter has gone up. Which has the greater effect?
The last time I looked at the price of an apartment I was shocked. And it wasn't even in a decent part of town.
Not to mention that even if it yields a desireable end point, the transition can be very rough. The reason the Luddites got violent is that al lot of them were starving. Many of them died. Saying "The next generation will have things better." isn't very convincing when your kids are dying.
You are right, we need a change, but it's got to include supporting those who don't benefit from the productivity increases.
My suspicion is that you are underestimating the degree of progress that's been happening in automation. I'm fairly certain you are underestimating the degree of progress that will happen. And building factories like this is a part of that progress. One reason Apple is probably doing it is to improve their ability to build automated factories.
One other thing you've got to have on that list to make it work long-term is free birth-control. Actually, even that won't suffice, but it will help. It really needs to be something more along the lines of the plan enacted by China.
OTOH, that's long term, and things will change so radically within the next 50 years, that planning for the long term may be unreasonable.
P.S.: Full employment with a living wage for everyone *IS* possible. But the social policies required to cause it to happen are quite unlikely. NOBODY has been proposing them. They would include not only measures to reduce the amount of a "living wage", but inducements for employers to employ more people. And positive penalties for not being employed. And automation would still eliminate jobs, it just wouldn't reduce employment.
P.P.S.: Note that I don't consider that kind of social policy desireable. It would give those defined as employers too much control. I don't *like* giving the government that much control, but I see no way to avoid it. To also give that much control to employers is *really* repugnant.
Perhaps you need to qualify what you consider a job. You clearly don't mean a clerk at Wallmart or McDonalds. They can't afford any of those things.
Perhaps some do. It's also true that many such people get the kind of health care that kills them. E.g., diabetics denied insulin. (It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens, and there aren't repercussions. After all, it's hard to *prove* malice, when all the witnesses can't or won't testify. And people in jail rarely have external support that can and will afford lawyers...and THOSE people don't get the same treatment.)
You need either people or better automated systems than we currently have.
You probably assumed this, but many of the readers seem to be presuming that the current state of the art will continue to be the state of the art. (Either that, or you think our current systems are a lot more advanced than they actually are.)
Shortening of the work week isn't even a good short term solution, except for commodity jobs.
Please note that which jobs are needed will be continually varying, and not in a monotonically decreasing fashion, but currently lots of specialty jobs aren't fillable by sufficiently skilled people, wereas many unskilled jobs have a superabundance of qualified people. Which jobs fit into which category changes with each change in automation, but there will always be, until near the end, some jobs for which there aren't enough skilled people, even at 60 hours a week. And working that long degrades the skills of the worker. For highly skilled worker, coerced working of over 35 hours/week degrades the skills (though inspiration may strike, and even 70 hours/week then isn't too much).
OTOH, the basic jobs need to be done, and for those a shorter work week is a reasonable solution...but only if it provides a reasibale living wage. And be aware that as automation progresses, more and more jobs will fall into this "basic" category, where there are more qualified practitioners than there are jobs available. Also consider that if commuting is involved, short work days are highly unfavorable. But if two people share the same work space at different times, this causes it's own problems. 30 hours/week if reasonable for many desk jobs, if one divides it into 3 8-hour days and one 4-hour day. That allows two people to share the same work-space at half a week each. IF there are enough of that kind of job. Which will be a time-varying function.
Note also that this makes pensions problematic. Since the amount of work needed is time varying, lots of people preparing of a job currently in high need can expect that after only a few years, they won't be needed. Whoops! Who pays for the preparation? It was *needed* at the time they prepared, but in just a few years it has become obsolete. This makes a large investment unreasonable. But highly trained people are needed, and will be needed. You just can predict exactly which skills will be needed for how long. What happens when an automated brain surgeon hits the market? It took multiple decades and multiple thousands of dollars for the current experts to develop their skills, Some are transferable to related specialties, but by no means all, and guess what ... the same transfer of skills is happening in the robot surgeon designers, and fewer of their skill have changed. So by the time the surgeon finishes preparing for his new specialty, it's already obsolete.
Do you think this projection is fantastic? But currently brain surgeons are working through telefactors which note every move they make, and eliminate slips and nervous twitches. Otherwise brain surgery would be much less safe. And they RECORD what is done. So any AI that can extract those patterns could repeat the operation. Currently they aren't good enough to decide when to do which action, and the proper language isn't shared by the robots and the doctors to allow the surgeon to say sever the _ghjklh_ and then rejoin the pieces with a _9opikl_ inserted between them to limit spiking. But it will be. And then the next higher level of patterns will need to be learned. And the next. It will take awhile, but the process has already been started.
One reason that prices in such things stay high is because of vandalism and maintenance. As those problems are handled, prices will drop until they compete effectively with non-automated businesses. Then the prices will stop dropping. This is known as "all the market will bear".
But do notice that you can't buy a head of lettuce from such a machine. Not this year. Not unless it's carefully pre-packaged, and even then only from a specialty machine that dispenses refridgerated items. This isn't even a prototype of an automated convenience store, which will probably be a merger between an automated warehouse and an automated teller, but with a full keyboard AND a speech recognition input. It won't be an expansion of the automated sandwich machines.
P.S.: Note I said expect. This time scale is definitely not dependable. It probably won't get to that point in less than 20 years. I'd be surprised if it took 40 years. 30 is a reasonable best guess. But we need to be prepared for it happening in 20 years, so that's what we should expect.
There are NO jobs that can't be automated. NONE. Not one.
If you spend 15 years learning to follow a profession, you can expect that by the time you've finished learning, the profession is obsolete.
Now there will be jobs that won't easily be replaced by a robot...though you might be surprised. To take one of your examples, a human bartender will be a rarity, and only seen in high priced clubs, unless there is a legal requirement, or he's the owner. But that's not in the next 5 years. More likely 15, though possibly 10.
Everything depends on the time scale at which you look at things. You won't see bus drivers replaced in the next 5 years, but you might see them replaced in 10 years.
There's already a "robot" in Japan that frequently fools people into thinking it's human...and it has NO intelligence at all, and can't move away from the desk. It's just a torso attached to a desk, but it looks totally human, even to the extent of breathing naturally. This was 5-10 years ago. I'm not sure that particular "robot" is even a telefactor, i.e., I'm not sure it has the capability of remote control. It was one of several academic experiments. (Note that I said "several". I only know of a very few, of course. But I only hear about those that news reporters find worth mentioning.)
In 20 years we should expect that the only jobs held by humans exist for non-economic reasons, like legal requirements, or power vested by law (as, e.g., the owner of a bar).
What time scale are you thinking on?
For 5 years you're practically certain to be correct.
For 10 years, you should expect to see major changes.
For 15 years, the number of mechanical engineers needed will be drastically reduced, and only the highly skilled need apply.
For 20 years, the number of mechanical engineers needed has be yet more drastically reduced, and the employers are screaming because they can't find enough sufficiently talented people.
For 25 years, no new mechanical engineers are being hired. Current ones are being encouraged to retire.
For 30 years, there is no need for a human in that profession.
Perhaps my time table is a bit off...but probably mainly by being too regular. I wouldn't bet whether it was fast or slow.
I think you are either very optimistic, or operating on a very short time frame. Unemployment is already over 20%...though how much over is impossible to determine, due to the way the statistics are finagled.
I expect that it will hit 50% unemployment within the decade. 75% soon afterwards. The final several percent will hold onto their jobs because of "social engineering" skills. E.g., top management is unlikely to decide to replace itself....though they may arrange that they have no replacement. I.e., it's quite likely that totally automated corporations will arrise because top management has either died off or lost interest in holding on. The first such should show up within the decade. It will probably fail, but in doing so solve many of the problems that such a system creates for itself. The second or third will probably succeed.
And some jobs will hang on because they are legally required. BART trains have train operators because they are legally required to. The system could be run, probably more efficiently, as a totally automated system. Not only today, but a decade ago. (Well, by totally automated here I'm not including maintenance, etc. I'm talking about the job of train operator.)
P.S.: Have you noticed the decrease in the number of grocery checkout clerks? Many of the registers are clusters overseen by one clerk. Sometimes jobs get eliminated by redesigning what the job consists of. But they still get redesigned to eliminate jobs or increase production...and in the limit this means all jobs are eliminated, though not this year.
My expectation is that within 50 years there will be no job that could not be done better by a robot, or possibly by a computer. 75 years would surprise me. This doesn't mean that all jobs will be eliminated, but rather that there will be no ECONOMIC reason for the jobs to exist.
You have a good point. Socially important services should not be dependent upon holding a job. Health care is a socially important service, so a high basic level of health care should be available to everyone, without question. (Note that I did NOT say "all citizens". Public health depends on everyone being healthy. Sick people spread sickness.)
Dense populations have different requirements than diffusely spread populations. Until around 1900, most people lived in the country-side, and we still haven't psychologically adjusted to the changes required by the changed circumstances. Our (i.e., the U.S.'s) current social policies seem determined to reduce the population by the reintroduction of various plagues. Several that had previously been nearly wiped out have already reappeared. Whooping cough is just the most recent that I've noticed. I'm sorry, but parents should NOT be allowed to refuse to have the children that they send to school vaccinated, and they MUST make provision for the children to be educated. Etc.
This year.
The workers that are being replaced aren't imaginary, they work for FoxConn in China...or something analogous. Most of your other points seem valid, if parochial. But it's not at all clear how this contributes to what you correctly identify as a "largely political matter". There isn't an obvious natural limit to "how rich" and individual can be, as there is to "how poor" he can be. And the extremely rich in the US are already so extremely much richer than ther poor, that there's no clear reason for not acting NOW to decrease the disparity. This kind of great disparity is dangerous to democratic governments...if not as dangerous as allowing corporations to be considered to be people. (But note that it's only dangerous to allow corporations to be considered people because they are rich. If they were no richer than the average citizen, then they would constitute no danger...unless, of course, you go full bore and grant them the vote.)
Thanks for understanding my point. I *do* know about Python's multiprocessing modules, but they aren't easy to use. Which is why I'm currently developing in D, despite Python having *MUCH* better libraries. D has a mode of parallelism where I can just say "execute this loop a parallel as you can". (Well, naturally it's a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the essence. I'm stepping through an array and each step is intended to be compatible with changes made by any other. So using numPy isn't the answer, or it doesn't appear to be from what I've read. I'd need to be calling back from numPy into Python all the time. And the Python parallel modes don't appear to do what I want either. A good message passing framework that didn't care what processor the destination was on would be good. A nice dataflow system would be good...but they don't seems to have developed. Probably because they showed up too early, and now they aren't fashionable anymore. But independent processes or threads aren't a good model for what I'm attempting.)
Of course, what I'd really like is a good Python compiler with a strong message-passing module, or possibly a strong dataflow module, that had a better documentation system than Doxygen. (Here, and for me, better means that it uses less screen space to display the documentation. This probably means a system that pops up windows in response to a click on a menu rather than using html. I've seen applications that do it, though, so it's not a pure pipe-dream. Both Qt and wxWidgets can handle this kind of application. Gtk used to be able to, but I'm not sure that it can anymore. OTOH, I'm not at all sure that tcl/tk can handle it. Perhaps I just never got deeply enough into it.) (Note that Sphinx seems to not be a step in the right direction.)
There have already been court decisions that say, essentially, that if something can be observed, even using rarely available technical means, from outside your property, that it counts as publicly available information. This has been used to convict people of indecent exposure who went swimming in the nude in their private pool behind a high opaque fence. (IIRC, the camera was mounted on a blimp.)
I don't know that that decision would hold up on appeal, but I sure don't know that it wouldn't.
While the reason against coerced confessions are as you state, I'm not really convinced that it was entirely for the benefit of an honest trial. Remember, the people who set things up had just revolted against an oppressive government, and many of them didn't have that much trust in the one they were setting up. So they wanted to ensure that a successful revolution would remain possible.
I'd say they did a fair job, but not a great one. Understandably, as entrenched power will always reinterpret any existing rules in it's own favor.
What you say was true the last time I checked in North Dakota, and on family farms in California (NOT on neighbor's farms, or the public roads).
I suppose that there are various other conditions in different states where it is also true. It is not true in general. Perhaps you are asserting that it *should* be true in general, but don't mistake that arguable belief for the existing state of affairs.
The public version doesn't seem to be improving very rapidly. That said, there are lots of good things about it (though I don't include the documentation).
I do, however, disagree with Guido's statement that "Python is fast enough". Whether it is or not depends entirely on what you're doing. For my purposes I don't think a 12-core computer optimally programmed in assembler would be "fast enough".
It's faster to write code in Python than in C or C++ or Pascal or Java. But Python isn't "fast enough" unless your program is I/O bound. And it's inability to handle multiple processing uints gracefully is a real problem. (Not that anyone has a decent answer to that except the dataflow people and the pure functional language people.) Multiple core machines are now the rule rather than the exception, so the GIL is no longer acceptable. Even Ruby attempts to address that, though they didn't really follow through after considering their library situation.
Another real problem that I have with Python is it's documentation system. (Again, nobody has a good answer.) The "built-in" documentation system is so bad that I prefer to use Doxygen, which itself isn't great. It's better than Epydoc, but barely. They need a much better system for generating html...one that doesn't create huge amounts of blank space. (Actually, they have a better system, but it only works to generate PDFs.) I know that I could customize it, but I also don't want to spend all my time fiddling with CSS.
N.B.: I've only got one screen and it's not huge, so large blank spaces in the generated documentation are just not acceptable. I need to fit both the current documentation, and the code I'm working with on my screen, and frequently a few other references as well. So the documentation within the code needs to be compact, and so does the generated html display. BOTH
Perhaps it's unfair to pick on Python for problems that nobody has really solved, but it needs to be said over and over until somebody figures out a decent fix.