I think there will always be something for people to do, but I think it's quite possible that for a lot of people it's going to wind up being "come up with something that you think other folks will like enough to buy and see if you're right".
And to make it interesting: If you guess wrong, you starve to death. Good luck contestants.
New technologies don't decrease the number of available jobs; wealth sequestration among the super-rich does. With the Middle Class having less and less money to spend, the demand for products -- and the jobs required to create them -- goes down. We've been seeing this over the past thirty years, which just happens to coincide with the rise of the computing industry.
New technology is the primary vehicle that the wealthy use to acquire more wealth. The greater the disruption the technology causes, the faster it increases the disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In the past, we have used progressive taxes to combat this trend. Today that mechanism is broken...
Of course, digital photography keeps far more than 13 people employed too.
The totality of digital photography employs far fewer, than just the 130k Kodak employed. The only way you can make the numbers say anything different is if you give credit for the totality of the cell phone industry to digital photography, or something equally absurd. The new industry that replaced photography is social networking, which employs far fewer people, and will employ even fewer as the inefficiencies are worked out while the industry matures.
Meanwhile, the population keeps growing. Under capitalism, supply and demand trumps all. That is why wages have stagnated, and will in fact begin to drop soon.
The point, that you have missed in all of this, is that economic evolution does in fact come with a cost to society. Although job losses in one market have given rise to new jobs in new markets, the effect on the overall economy is to polarize the population into the extremes of poverty and wealth. It actively destroys the middle class by making its individuals either wealthy (the lucky 1%), or gradually poorer (the other 99%). It is no accident that ours will be the first generation to fail to live the American dream (lower standard of living than our parents). This is because the forces that stood between 99% of us and the poverty line have been slowly eroded. Those forces included unions, social security, and the protection of workers rights under the laws. The result is that middle class and working class jobs are being eliminated by improvements in technology, and the only people whose standard of living is increasing are the 1%. Everyone else is slowly sliding backward. How many people out there are making the same today as they were 20 years ago after inflation? Where I work, all of the jobs pay the same actual starting wage as they did 20 years ago! My employer hands out 1.5% raises for everyone who is merely average, and if you were to somehow invent a cure for cancer, you might get 3% that year. In inflation adjusted dollars, I make less than I did when I started, and the new guys coming in make 25% less than I did when I started. This is because there is an oversupply of labor at all levels, and the company has no reason to pay more. We can however lay claim to the prize of having the most profitable 5 quarters in the history of the company. Our CEO makes 7 times what the CEO made 15 years ago, meanwhile the rest of us are expected to pay 20% of our medical and dental benefits out of the less-than-15-years-ago wages we get now.
The only way to fix this is to correct the imbalance. Either do something to increase labor demand, or do something to reduce the supply. I would strongly advocate for a forced reduction in the acceptable work week from 40 hours to 30. Enforce that by making time worked over 30 hours pay double rate, and end overtime exemption for *all* employees. Prices would change, companies would adjust, and the stock market would take it in the shorts, but considering that the stock market got 30 years of ill gotten gains by siphoning off the wages of the workers, I'm not really that sympathetic...
The industrial revolution DID cause unrest. Only an idiot would think that wasn't the case. A whole body of famous literature is about said unrest, that people I would suspect are aware of even if not history in general. The Labor movement was an expression of unrest, as was the communist revolution.
It didn't take long for it to improve things overall, and not many sane people want to go back to a pre-industrial world, but to pretend it didn't cause job loss and unrest before job gain and improvement is absurd. I think that's what both the Luddites and the Futurists get wrong, there will be pain, there will be suffering, then there will be benefit. Markets take time to adjust, and attempts to short-circuit that adjustment time have historically gone terribly wrong (e.g. great leap forward).
At some point, we reach what is known as The singularity. After that point, there is nothing to require human involvement in society at all. As such, we damn well better have a new type of economy, or the "haves" will dispose of the "have nots", and soon there will be far fewer humans around (if any).
If a CEO gets the owner one million dollars per day, the owner can afford to pay that CEO $999,999 per day and still pocket $1 a day. It's not your business. The owner can decide if the CEO is worth it. The CEO can decide if the pay is worth it.
Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere. They have the right to order their affairs and sell their time as they see fit, finding the most advantageous deal they can. The employer can decide if the labor provided is worth it. The employee can decide if the pay is worth it.
Uh oh. I see the problem. Where does the 3rd party fit in? Some other person, like a government bureaucrat, intellectual elitist who doesn't actually do work for money, or politician pandering for popular votes... where can that person inject their bullshit in this scenario. A problem indeed!
What happens when the majority of economic activity requires no workers at all? Then the owner gets a pile of profits, pays no workers at all, and only owners can afford anything because everyone else is unemployed and unemployable...
Capitalism is inherently flawed just like any other economic system. The underlying set of assumptions for capitalism has been reasonable so far, but it will not remain so. Capitalism will fail for the same reason that communism fell. Both systems make fundamental assumptions about the nature of economy, and both sets of assumptions are not always true.
Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"
at those prices, consumers are a lot more discerning than MS thinks. That's why they fail almost every time they try. The upper limit of consumer stupidity is (in my experience) around $200-$300 USD. anything more than that is beyond the amount of money people are willing to spend on an impulse buy. People coughed up a ton for the iPhone because they needed a phone anyway, and could justify the higher price tag because the difference fell below that magic threshold. The iPad was something of an anomaly, and MS thought they could produce the same results as Apple, but MS does not have any of Apples glitter, and should in no way expect to be able to sell to the top of the market any time soon. Even Samsung isnt trying to sell product with the same margin as Apple because they have smart people in marketing who tell them that their products are not so well positioned that they can charge a premium for the name. MS marketing is either lying to management and telling them they can sell to a market segment they have no hope of penetrating, or management is ignoring their experts... Either way, MS is trying to sell to the highest margin segment of the market, but there is only one way to get into that segment: You get there first with exceptional products. Everyone else has to settle for eroding the margins.
These people (Clapper, et all) don't even comprehend that what they are doing is wrong. They genuinely believe they are doing good! These people are far more dangerous than all of the terrorists combined because they are slowly and surely handing our country to a future tyrant who will commit more atrocities than all of the terrorists combined. In spite of that they believe they are on the side of righteousness.
Those that support these programs will not wake up to the reality of what they are doing / have done until it is too late to undo without massive bloodshed. We have the opportunity to stop it now, but I have little faith that the unwashed masses can be brought to understand what the "think of the children" mentality is doing to our country.
Little bit of insider information, most of it is from that Wall Street Journal article from around Jan 2011 talking about the decision. I can't find the article right now and there is a chance they may never have published it online.
Translate that as: I'm lying out my ass, and will duck any attempt to call me out on it...
The message contents, yes. But the header information they did have access to, as it's necessary for delivery. And that information is what the FBI wanted, and that information is what was all protected by a single SSL cert.
Negative, the SSL cert did not, and does not protect anything on the system itself, just the information in transit. The FBI wanted the SSL cert so that they could perform an MITM attack and consequently be able to prove who sent what to whom.
They can't call our debts. Bonds have maturation periods. Furthermore, even if the US did have to pay back the entire debt at once, they could do so because it is denominated in dollars and we can print as many as we want.
Go ahead and print 10 Trillion USD, and see how fast your own people revolt, never mind the Chinese.
Ah the same decade AI people have been telling us about for nearly 50 years. Frankly, I'm not sure we are really any closer today than we were in the 60s.
We aren't any closer. As I said, it will require a breakthrough, and that can happen at anytime and is largely unpredictable. I said on the order of a decade, I didn't say on the close order of a decade.
First, no trade wars, because there would be no trade. Internal economy. We have both abundant resources and a huge consuming base. Barriers up, both ways. You can't have a trade war if you aren't engaged in trade.
Second, protectionism will have to include hard borders -- no further immigration.
If we suddenly stopped buying from or selling to the Chinese, they would suddenly find themselves with absolutely no incentive to help us maintain our way of life. The single biggest deterrent we have to war with China is the fact that our economies are so intertwined. If we stop trading with them, our economy collapses, but so does theirs. Next thing you know, the Chinese government calls all of our debts, and when we fail to pay, they declare war.
AI is a pipe dream for at least the next century. We don't really understand how our own minds work.
Actually, capable AI will require a breakthrough, which is unpredictable. It could happen tomorrow, it could be 500 years. I thinks its more likely on the order of a decade rather than a century, but who knows.
I would imagine that anyone making jokes about this has no children. To anyone with kids, the thought of something like this happening is simply gut-wrenching. But since relations with the opposite sex are required for procreation, I guess the tasteless jokes and, what's worse, modding up of such, is to be expected here.
I have kids, and this doesn't bother me as much I might have otherwise thought. I guess its cause my kids are still too young to let them play unsupervised (or with anything dangerous). By 19, however, its sink or swim time...
While modern consumer and academic/business oriented operating systems do allow administrators to full access to the system, this does not have to be the case. Indeed, I was under the impression that computers employed by certain government agencies ensure that this was not the case.
There is a level at which a computer must function where the software simply cannot be prevented from real-time access to the hardware. Without this layer, the computers simply cannot function. Along with that comes an administrator that must (by definition) be able to modify that software. That person has to be trusted because there isn't a damn thing you could do to stop them from doing whatever the hell they please. You could make it more work for them, but you cannot stop them because they have hardware level access.
Given that, there is no particular reason that someone in Snowdens position needed that level of access, so why he had it remains a mystery. None of that changes the fact that the fault lies directly with the NSA security design flaws. Security through obscurity only works if you're obscure, failing that you need an actual plan...
Even in the case of consume and academic/business oriented operating systems, the are ways to ensure the confidentiality of data at the application level.
There is no effective way to guarantee confidentiality from someone with hardware level access. You can slow them down, but they have you by the bits. You need to plan accordingly, and select these persons with extreme care.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there will always be something for people to do, but I think it's quite possible that for a lot of people it's going to wind up being "come up with something that you think other folks will like enough to buy and see if you're right".
And to make it interesting: If you guess wrong, you starve to death. Good luck contestants.
New technologies don't decrease the number of available jobs; wealth sequestration among the super-rich does. With the Middle Class having less and less money to spend, the demand for products -- and the jobs required to create them -- goes down. We've been seeing this over the past thirty years, which just happens to coincide with the rise of the computing industry.
New technology is the primary vehicle that the wealthy use to acquire more wealth. The greater the disruption the technology causes, the faster it increases the disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In the past, we have used progressive taxes to combat this trend. Today that mechanism is broken...
Of course, digital photography keeps far more than 13 people employed too.
The totality of digital photography employs far fewer, than just the 130k Kodak employed. The only way you can make the numbers say anything different is if you give credit for the totality of the cell phone industry to digital photography, or something equally absurd. The new industry that replaced photography is social networking, which employs far fewer people, and will employ even fewer as the inefficiencies are worked out while the industry matures.
Meanwhile, the population keeps growing. Under capitalism, supply and demand trumps all. That is why wages have stagnated, and will in fact begin to drop soon.
The point, that you have missed in all of this, is that economic evolution does in fact come with a cost to society. Although job losses in one market have given rise to new jobs in new markets, the effect on the overall economy is to polarize the population into the extremes of poverty and wealth. It actively destroys the middle class by making its individuals either wealthy (the lucky 1%), or gradually poorer (the other 99%). It is no accident that ours will be the first generation to fail to live the American dream (lower standard of living than our parents). This is because the forces that stood between 99% of us and the poverty line have been slowly eroded. Those forces included unions, social security, and the protection of workers rights under the laws. The result is that middle class and working class jobs are being eliminated by improvements in technology, and the only people whose standard of living is increasing are the 1%. Everyone else is slowly sliding backward. How many people out there are making the same today as they were 20 years ago after inflation? Where I work, all of the jobs pay the same actual starting wage as they did 20 years ago! My employer hands out 1.5% raises for everyone who is merely average, and if you were to somehow invent a cure for cancer, you might get 3% that year. In inflation adjusted dollars, I make less than I did when I started, and the new guys coming in make 25% less than I did when I started. This is because there is an oversupply of labor at all levels, and the company has no reason to pay more. We can however lay claim to the prize of having the most profitable 5 quarters in the history of the company. Our CEO makes 7 times what the CEO made 15 years ago, meanwhile the rest of us are expected to pay 20% of our medical and dental benefits out of the less-than-15-years-ago wages we get now.
The only way to fix this is to correct the imbalance. Either do something to increase labor demand, or do something to reduce the supply. I would strongly advocate for a forced reduction in the acceptable work week from 40 hours to 30. Enforce that by making time worked over 30 hours pay double rate, and end overtime exemption for *all* employees. Prices would change, companies would adjust, and the stock market would take it in the shorts, but considering that the stock market got 30 years of ill gotten gains by siphoning off the wages of the workers, I'm not really that sympathetic...
It's a stupid premise and a fasle dichotomy IMO.
The industrial revolution DID cause unrest. Only an idiot would think that wasn't the case. A whole body of famous literature is about said unrest, that people I would suspect are aware of even if not history in general. The Labor movement was an expression of unrest, as was the communist revolution.
It didn't take long for it to improve things overall, and not many sane people want to go back to a pre-industrial world, but to pretend it didn't cause job loss and unrest before job gain and improvement is absurd. I think that's what both the Luddites and the Futurists get wrong, there will be pain, there will be suffering, then there will be benefit. Markets take time to adjust, and attempts to short-circuit that adjustment time have historically gone terribly wrong (e.g. great leap forward).
At some point, we reach what is known as The singularity. After that point, there is nothing to require human involvement in society at all. As such, we damn well better have a new type of economy, or the "haves" will dispose of the "have nots", and soon there will be far fewer humans around (if any).
If a CEO gets the owner one million dollars per day, the owner can afford to pay that CEO $999,999 per day and still pocket $1 a day. It's not your business. The owner can decide if the CEO is worth it. The CEO can decide if the pay is worth it.
Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere. They have the right to order their affairs and sell their time as they see fit, finding the most advantageous deal they can. The employer can decide if the labor provided is worth it. The employee can decide if the pay is worth it.
Uh oh. I see the problem. Where does the 3rd party fit in? Some other person, like a government bureaucrat, intellectual elitist who doesn't actually do work for money, or politician pandering for popular votes... where can that person inject their bullshit in this scenario. A problem indeed!
What happens when the majority of economic activity requires no workers at all? Then the owner gets a pile of profits, pays no workers at all, and only owners can afford anything because everyone else is unemployed and unemployable...
Capitalism is inherently flawed just like any other economic system. The underlying set of assumptions for capitalism has been reasonable so far, but it will not remain so. Capitalism will fail for the same reason that communism fell. Both systems make fundamental assumptions about the nature of economy, and both sets of assumptions are not always true.
Bunch of worthless rant removed
It is exceptionally hard to take a post about the evils of anonymity seriously from someone who posts as an anonymous coward...
Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"
at those prices, consumers are a lot more discerning than MS thinks. That's why they fail almost every time they try. The upper limit of consumer stupidity is (in my experience) around $200-$300 USD. anything more than that is beyond the amount of money people are willing to spend on an impulse buy. People coughed up a ton for the iPhone because they needed a phone anyway, and could justify the higher price tag because the difference fell below that magic threshold. The iPad was something of an anomaly, and MS thought they could produce the same results as Apple, but MS does not have any of Apples glitter, and should in no way expect to be able to sell to the top of the market any time soon. Even Samsung isnt trying to sell product with the same margin as Apple because they have smart people in marketing who tell them that their products are not so well positioned that they can charge a premium for the name. MS marketing is either lying to management and telling them they can sell to a market segment they have no hope of penetrating, or management is ignoring their experts... Either way, MS is trying to sell to the highest margin segment of the market, but there is only one way to get into that segment: You get there first with exceptional products. Everyone else has to settle for eroding the margins.
They made three of them. Ballmer bought one, Gates bought one. The last one is sitting in Best Buy waiting for someone to buy it.
I've got ten bucks that says that thing is mine! I'm going down there right now to get it.
If that's so, why aren't the morbidly obese more employable?
Because they are not very good at marketing. Duh.
"When fascism came to America, it was wrapped in the flag and was carrying the cross."
Fixed that for you
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
When?
and I don't even live in the states
You wouldn't feel that way if you lived here...
These people (Clapper, et all) don't even comprehend that what they are doing is wrong. They genuinely believe they are doing good! These people are far more dangerous than all of the terrorists combined because they are slowly and surely handing our country to a future tyrant who will commit more atrocities than all of the terrorists combined. In spite of that they believe they are on the side of righteousness.
Those that support these programs will not wake up to the reality of what they are doing / have done until it is too late to undo without massive bloodshed. We have the opportunity to stop it now, but I have little faith that the unwashed masses can be brought to understand what the "think of the children" mentality is doing to our country.
-=Geoskd
Little bit of insider information, most of it is from that Wall Street Journal article from around Jan 2011 talking about the decision. I can't find the article right now and there is a chance they may never have published it online.
Translate that as: I'm lying out my ass, and will duck any attempt to call me out on it...
The message contents, yes. But the header information they did have access to, as it's necessary for delivery. And that information is what the FBI wanted, and that information is what was all protected by a single SSL cert.
Negative, the SSL cert did not, and does not protect anything on the system itself, just the information in transit. The FBI wanted the SSL cert so that they could perform an MITM attack and consequently be able to prove who sent what to whom.
Why would they need to add https? To encrypt the text you are posting publicly? What is the impact of a MITM attack for a /. user?
Might improve the quality of some of the posts...
Isn't that what happened at first? Then peoples across history, independently across geographical areas, evolved societies with rules and laws.
Maybe we as a species prefer limitations on our freedom in exchange for our survival and comfort.
Man doesn't have an inability to govern himself, He has a fundamental inability to refrain from governing others...
-=Geoskd
They can't call our debts. Bonds have maturation periods. Furthermore, even if the US did have to pay back the entire debt at once, they could do so because it is denominated in dollars and we can print as many as we want.
Go ahead and print 10 Trillion USD, and see how fast your own people revolt, never mind the Chinese.
Ah the same decade AI people have been telling us about for nearly 50 years. Frankly, I'm not sure we are really any closer today than we were in the 60s.
We aren't any closer. As I said, it will require a breakthrough, and that can happen at anytime and is largely unpredictable. I said on the order of a decade, I didn't say on the close order of a decade.
First, no trade wars, because there would be no trade. Internal economy. We have both abundant resources and a huge consuming base. Barriers up, both ways. You can't have a trade war if you aren't engaged in trade.
Second, protectionism will have to include hard borders -- no further immigration.
If we suddenly stopped buying from or selling to the Chinese, they would suddenly find themselves with absolutely no incentive to help us maintain our way of life. The single biggest deterrent we have to war with China is the fact that our economies are so intertwined. If we stop trading with them, our economy collapses, but so does theirs. Next thing you know, the Chinese government calls all of our debts, and when we fail to pay, they declare war.
At first, yes, but:
1. Robot maintenance jobs will go away once robots get good enough to repair other robots.
2. Robot building jobs will go away once robots get good enough to build new robots.
3. Robot design jobs will go away once robots get good enough to design better robots than themselves.
You got 1 and two backwards. 2 will happen first, then 1...
We will probably not survive as a species to see 3...
AI is a pipe dream for at least the next century. We don't really understand how our own minds work.
Actually, capable AI will require a breakthrough, which is unpredictable. It could happen tomorrow, it could be 500 years. I thinks its more likely on the order of a decade rather than a century, but who knows.
I would imagine that anyone making jokes about this has no children. To anyone with kids, the thought of something like this happening is simply gut-wrenching. But since relations with the opposite sex are required for procreation, I guess the tasteless jokes and, what's worse, modding up of such, is to be expected here.
I have kids, and this doesn't bother me as much I might have otherwise thought. I guess its cause my kids are still too young to let them play unsupervised (or with anything dangerous). By 19, however, its sink or swim time...
I'm sorry, but i'm going to use Zero, One, Zero, One, Two, Zero, One, Four instead.
Oh, and you owe me $1.06USD for the use of the character strings "One" and "Four" in the preceding post.
While modern consumer and academic/business oriented operating systems do allow administrators to full access to the system, this does not have to be the case. Indeed, I was under the impression that computers employed by certain government agencies ensure that this was not the case.
There is a level at which a computer must function where the software simply cannot be prevented from real-time access to the hardware. Without this layer, the computers simply cannot function. Along with that comes an administrator that must (by definition) be able to modify that software. That person has to be trusted because there isn't a damn thing you could do to stop them from doing whatever the hell they please. You could make it more work for them, but you cannot stop them because they have hardware level access.
Given that, there is no particular reason that someone in Snowdens position needed that level of access, so why he had it remains a mystery. None of that changes the fact that the fault lies directly with the NSA security design flaws. Security through obscurity only works if you're obscure, failing that you need an actual plan...
Even in the case of consume and academic/business oriented operating systems, the are ways to ensure the confidentiality of data at the application level.
There is no effective way to guarantee confidentiality from someone with hardware level access. You can slow them down, but they have you by the bits. You need to plan accordingly, and select these persons with extreme care.