Whatever you do, don't listen to crap like this. CS related fields are among the fastest growing fields in the US. But it is not a career where you can be passive in your career development, since you can easily find yourself unemployable if you stagnate for too long.
A job is what pays your bills, so you can go and do things you like. [...] In the end, we're all worm-food, so make every day count.
It's interesting that you talk about making every day count but discount the impact he can make with what is likely going to be his most meaningful contribution to society outside of his potential future family. I'd say if you want to make every day count, don't waste 8-9 hours of each day doing something that doesn't count, or doesn't count as much as it could if you put more effort in.
Just working for the weekends seams like a waste of 70% of the week to me.
Yes, a histogram showing the earnings of each development house (which sell apps that make revenue) by their percentage of the total App Store earnings, would give a better picture of how well most app developers are doing. My guess is it would look something like this:
Top 2% - $19.5 billion Next 18% - $485 million Next 20% - $14.75 million Next 60% - $250 thousand
You ignore externalities. Pollution, safety, health, medical, and other costs not born by the corporations raping the environment and abusing workers.
If anything, externalities boost my argument because nations such as China don't deal with them as effectively and broadly as the US does. Offshoring on the other hand provides enormous improvements to these externalities because it gives incentives for developing countries to improve more rapidly. The US will have much greater global impact by enticing all nations to improve than it could ever have just focusing on itself only.
First off, any opportunity to chip at the Apple PR machine should not be wasted. And second, I think it is fair to say Apple started or at least mainstreamed the "thinner instead of more functionality" trend so mentioning them here seem appropriate.
Unfortunately, the claimed three hours of additional battery life aren’t meant to make this laptop into some long-lasting wonder — they’re really just meant to normalize its battery life. [...] It is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it’s merely matching the battery life of last year’s 1080p model.
This isn't courage, this is just a good PR spin on them having to increase the size of their laptop to accommodate a 4k resolution. I'm glad they chose this route instead of cutting battery life but this isn't some kind of grand gesture.
Yes, we should offshore as many jobs as we can where US citizens do not have a competitive advantage compared to the global market. This is why we still have the largest economy both in total size and per capita when compared to similarly sized nations.
Try gaining some useful skills and you'll see the benefits of this increased efficiency too. Two thirds of the people leaving the middle class are moving to the upper middle class. We should be doing more to help those who are unable to keep up, but propping up jobs which shouldn't be done in this country anyway just because we feel sorry for them is the wrong answer.
Explain why protectionist policies work for Europe, China, and Japan, but could not possibly work for the US.
They either don't work well or are in very different situations than the US.
Japan is a nation without much natural resources, so they need to be more careful than most nations. Their protectionist strategies make it impossible to have the same kind of GDP per capita as nations such as the US or EU, but they don't have much of a choice. They don't have much natural resources so they have to be very protective of the resources they have. They are willing to live with a lower ceiling to ensure a higher floor. But regardless about conjecture regarding why Japan's policies work for them, I doubt the median US household would want the nearly 20% pay cut to match the Japanese.
Protectionist strategies work great for developing countries. They have something wealthier nations need (cheap labor) so they are allowed to play by a different set of rules. China will not be able to play their current game for much longer as they are no longer the cheapest labor force out there. Already they are pushing automation to reduce their labor costs so their current economic engine is not disrupted too much. But once again I doubt the median US household would want a more than 80% pay cut to match the Chinese, so I wouldn't want to emulate them too much.
And other than agriculturally, the EU is not significantly more protectionist than the US. EU protectionism is on the rise, but not for long enough for the adverse effects to be felt. That is the worst part of protectionist strategies, they actually do work for a short period even in developed nations until their long term negative effects kick in. But yet again, are you saying the US would enjoy the 25% drop in median wages it would take to emulate the EU more closely?
I love my country, which is why I want it to stay competitive. Factory payrolls, construction contracts, and industrial production all increased after the Smoot-Hawley act as well, but the Great Depression was a grim reminder of what happens when countries try for short term gains through protectionist measures.
That sounds fabulous for the US. $700bn invested in the US instead of $1.6bn in Mexico?
Well, can't edit comments, but it's easy to see from the summary that I meant $700 million.
And if you weren't just being pedantic, it's fairly clear that Ford's total production of cars will be less from a $700 million addition than a $1.6 billion facility in a country with lower manufacturing costs. So if this had anything to do with the current administration, then the loss here is all of the cars Ford could have sold but now won't because of fear of a trade war. That is not a good thing.
And a loss for our domestic car companies who apparently are starting to become less competitive to appease our new President. In what world is a car company deciding to cancel $1.6 billion in investment for the future and replace it with only $700 billion of investment a good thing?
This may have nothing to do with the new administration. Ford could have simply realized they couldn't justify $1.6 billion in investment for new facilities, and needed to be more cautious by enhancing current factories. But if they really did make this decision because of fear of tariffs, we are already starting to see some of the worst consequences of protectionism. American companies being coerced to decrease efficiency to appease those who oppose the modernization of our workforce cannot be considered a win for anyone concerned about the long term economic health of our country.
All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning
Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.
Considering the solution to the solar power deficiency being discussed was to use non-solar to fill in the gaps, it is clear I didn't even suggest the problems with solar energy are always solved by more solar energy. I didn't say the problems with solar energy don't exist, just that they are easily solvable. Cost is the only significant hindrance in all but the most extreme cases, and it is becoming less of an issue every year.
Peaking power plants typically run at under 10% utilization year round. During cloudy days these typically natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels. Combine that with the fact that typical solar panels still run at around 20% efficiency with dense cloud cover you could reduce the number of traditional power plants by at least a factor of 10 by replacing them with solar plants. And this is without trying to store electricity as an alternative.
All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable and most are hardly even worth mentioning, other than to refute myths that is.
Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?
Peaking power plants, or power plants that generally only run when there is high demand, are generally gas turbines that burn natural gas. It is common for peaker plants to run only a few hours a day with well under 10% capacity. This is not a new problem. Electricity storage continues to become cheaper and as time goes on there will be less need for these types of power plants, but we have them now and could build more if they help us transition to more renewable energy sources.
China knows about real costs, and they are building new coal plants at about 1 a week.
China is overbuilding unnecessary coal plants for the same reason they are overbuilding everywhere else. Cheap money and perverse incentives. Their coal plants are already operating at below 50% capacity. Their coal consumption has dropped for the past two years and the drop is accelerating.
Worst case scenario you can use natural gas then (or other renewable options like hydro and geothermal). Best case scenario is battery technology is also cheap enough that it becomes more widespread. This isn't a tough question.
If rich people/corporations don't hire people because it's not cost effective then people won't have money and can't buy from them. People will figure out how to live without money, money will become worthless, and rich people will have nothing.
That is a real concern, but not one any corporations have the ability to solve. Any company proactive enough to try would find themselves noncompetitive and would fail earlier than if they had not tried to solve this issue. The tragedy of the commons applies to large corporations as well.
This is only something which can be solved by society, aka government. We need a large consumer base to provide enough incentive for a select few to continue innovating and pushing society forward. Soon income redistribution will be the only way to maintain this large consumer base.
Then again, tell me of how companies are going to make money to service the stakeholders when there are not people around wh ocan buy their highly profitable wares?
Which is why a basic income is nearly inevitable. The tragedy of the commons ensures the solution will never come from companies.
Welcome to the endgame of supply side only outlook. As humanity is drug down by lack of access, the job creators will prey upon each other. That might look more like The Hunger Games world
Without massive income redistribution, it will most likely it will look like the feudal systems of the past. The wealthy will continue to live very affluent lives while everyone else lives in poverty. Growth will slow to a crawl since there aren't enough consumers to fuel our current innovative economic engine, so it will stay this way for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it doesn't come to this in the first place.
Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.
But the consistent trend over the past 30 years is that many blue collar workers put out of work by automation and to a lesser extent outsourcing have not found new industries. Worker participation rates among those age 25-54 have dropped from about 85% to 81% in the past 15 years, and even if this rather gradual shift continues you will see another few million people unemployable in the next decade or two.
This is without meaningful advances in AI having much affect; it's just a continuation of the automation we have been seeing for the past few decades. During the 90's we were creating new jobs even faster than they were lost, but the low hanging fruit is long gone. More recent dangers to existing jobs, like customer service bots and self driving cars, require far less capital expenditure than previous technologies like factory automation. Instead of our economy having a few decades to slowly adjust to the loss of manufacturing jobs, our economy may have less than a decade to adjust to the loss of 10's of millions of customer service and professional driving jobs.
Those who are worried about the potential loss of jobs from AI are not just making up their predictions from thin air. They are looking at the trends of the past few decades and not seeing much encouragement there.
I on the other hand hope your capacity for childhood whimsy can live again someday. Nearly everything I do with my two year old daughter could be considered childish, unmanly, unproductive, etc by curmudgeons like you, but I am glad not everyone shares your bleak view on what forms of entertainment are acceptable. Watching my daughter laugh as her tongue becomes huge in the phone screen is a damn good use of my time, IMHO, and my family members asking for more snap-chats like that seem to agree.
I also can get a good laugh at my young sister and brother in law dancing at a New Year's party with silly filters on their faces, so I don't think childish fun only applies to interactions with toddlers either.
You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts.
Actually yes it does. The history of the blitzkrieg is not one of France quickly adapting to new technologies and strategies to repel the German invaders. It is of France's Maginot line being mostly useless in the war and Germany capturing Paris with ease. Something neither side could accomplish in over four years in the previous war was accomplished in around two months using the new paradigm.
Will human participation in the workforce adapt to AI technologies in the next 50 years? Almost certainly. Is it likely to cause disruption unlike anything our species has seen before? Almost certainly. Will human participation in the workforce never again resemble the levels we see today? Entirely possible.
It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
The buggy whip story shows that an entire species which had significant economic value for thousands of years found that technology had finally reached a point where they weren't needed. Instead of needing 20 million of them working in our economy in 1920, by 1960 there were only about 4.5 million. While they were able to take advantage of the previous technological revolutions and become even more useful because of better technology in the past, most horses could not survive the invention of the automobile.
The human intellect has enabled our species to keep up with technology for at least 100 years longer than arguably the second most productive work bearing species in our economy, but that doesn't mean we will forever. Most likely the fate of the horse in the early 1900's gives us a good view of what will happen to human workforce participation in the next 50 years. Around 9 million horses are still part of our economy today, but if horses had kept up with humans in our economy there would be more like 60 million.
Using the automobile revolution as a guide for what will happen in the AI revolution, human working age workforce participation could be at 15% in 40 years.
40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined.
Of this we have no disagreement. But these new companies will continue to need less people to do the work. The oldest 5 companies to be added to the DJIA employ 1900 people per $1 billion in revenue. The newest 5 companies require only 1100 employees. Looking at the 10 largest companies by market cap, the companies founded in the last 50 years require 1270 employees per $1 billion in revenue. The companies founded earlier than that (all three of them founded over 100 years ago) require 1850 employees.
You may not see the people being displaced by these changes already, but we all heard them loud and clear during the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns. Unfortunately their rage is misplaced towards outsourcing when the real culprit is a technologically advanced economy that doesn't need their skills anymore. Not enough to justify living wages in their society that is.
Customer service bots and automated vehicles alone have the capability of displacing 10's of millions of workers in a very short time. Whether we look at 100 years ago or just this century so far, it is clear we won't find new industries for many if not most of these workers.
You may have a better imagination than me, but a belief in Santa Claus doesn't make him real.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Apparently because you are horrible at determining what is entertaining to most people. I have seen all six of the films mentioned in the summary (although only three of them in theaters) and found them all very fun to watch. The six films had an average Meta-critic score of 73 and a Meta-critic user score of 7.3, so it appears the critics and the movie goers had nearly the same reactions to the movies.
As another comment pointed out, movies and TV are generally the entertainment equivalent of eating pizza and hamburgers. Life is too short to be so pretentious about what forms of fun are better than others.
Slashdot Mirror
CS basically dead, in the US, thanks to the H1-B.
Whatever you do, don't listen to crap like this. CS related fields are among the fastest growing fields in the US. But it is not a career where you can be passive in your career development, since you can easily find yourself unemployable if you stagnate for too long.
A job is what pays your bills, so you can go and do things you like. [...] In the end, we're all worm-food, so make every day count.
It's interesting that you talk about making every day count but discount the impact he can make with what is likely going to be his most meaningful contribution to society outside of his potential future family. I'd say if you want to make every day count, don't waste 8-9 hours of each day doing something that doesn't count, or doesn't count as much as it could if you put more effort in.
Just working for the weekends seams like a waste of 70% of the week to me.
Yes, a histogram showing the earnings of each development house (which sell apps that make revenue) by their percentage of the total App Store earnings, would give a better picture of how well most app developers are doing. My guess is it would look something like this:
Top 2% - $19.5 billion
Next 18% - $485 million
Next 20% - $14.75 million
Next 60% - $250 thousand
You ignore externalities. Pollution, safety, health, medical, and other costs not born by the corporations raping the environment and abusing workers.
If anything, externalities boost my argument because nations such as China don't deal with them as effectively and broadly as the US does. Offshoring on the other hand provides enormous improvements to these externalities because it gives incentives for developing countries to improve more rapidly. The US will have much greater global impact by enticing all nations to improve than it could ever have just focusing on itself only.
First off, any opportunity to chip at the Apple PR machine should not be wasted. And second, I think it is fair to say Apple started or at least mainstreamed the "thinner instead of more functionality" trend so mentioning them here seem appropriate.
From the article:
Unfortunately, the claimed three hours of additional battery life aren’t meant to make this laptop into some long-lasting wonder — they’re really just meant to normalize its battery life. [...] It is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it’s merely matching the battery life of last year’s 1080p model.
This isn't courage, this is just a good PR spin on them having to increase the size of their laptop to accommodate a 4k resolution. I'm glad they chose this route instead of cutting battery life but this isn't some kind of grand gesture.
Yes, we should offshore as many jobs as we can where US citizens do not have a competitive advantage compared to the global market. This is why we still have the largest economy both in total size and per capita when compared to similarly sized nations.
Try gaining some useful skills and you'll see the benefits of this increased efficiency too. Two thirds of the people leaving the middle class are moving to the upper middle class. We should be doing more to help those who are unable to keep up, but propping up jobs which shouldn't be done in this country anyway just because we feel sorry for them is the wrong answer.
Explain why protectionist policies work for Europe, China, and Japan, but could not possibly work for the US.
They either don't work well or are in very different situations than the US.
Japan is a nation without much natural resources, so they need to be more careful than most nations. Their protectionist strategies make it impossible to have the same kind of GDP per capita as nations such as the US or EU, but they don't have much of a choice. They don't have much natural resources so they have to be very protective of the resources they have. They are willing to live with a lower ceiling to ensure a higher floor. But regardless about conjecture regarding why Japan's policies work for them, I doubt the median US household would want the nearly 20% pay cut to match the Japanese.
Protectionist strategies work great for developing countries. They have something wealthier nations need (cheap labor) so they are allowed to play by a different set of rules. China will not be able to play their current game for much longer as they are no longer the cheapest labor force out there. Already they are pushing automation to reduce their labor costs so their current economic engine is not disrupted too much. But once again I doubt the median US household would want a more than 80% pay cut to match the Chinese, so I wouldn't want to emulate them too much.
And other than agriculturally, the EU is not significantly more protectionist than the US. EU protectionism is on the rise, but not for long enough for the adverse effects to be felt. That is the worst part of protectionist strategies, they actually do work for a short period even in developed nations until their long term negative effects kick in. But yet again, are you saying the US would enjoy the 25% drop in median wages it would take to emulate the EU more closely?
Why do you hate America?
I love my country, which is why I want it to stay competitive. Factory payrolls, construction contracts, and industrial production all increased after the Smoot-Hawley act as well, but the Great Depression was a grim reminder of what happens when countries try for short term gains through protectionist measures.
And yet so many import brand cars are actually made in factories in the USA so why can't our domestic brands keep it in country?
They do when it makes sense to do so, and don't when it doesn't. Just like import brand cars which are sometimes built in the US and sometimes aren't.
That sounds fabulous for the US. $700bn invested in the US instead of $1.6bn in Mexico?
Well, can't edit comments, but it's easy to see from the summary that I meant $700 million.
And if you weren't just being pedantic, it's fairly clear that Ford's total production of cars will be less from a $700 million addition than a $1.6 billion facility in a country with lower manufacturing costs. So if this had anything to do with the current administration, then the loss here is all of the cars Ford could have sold but now won't because of fear of a trade war. That is not a good thing.
Another win for The Donald
And a loss for our domestic car companies who apparently are starting to become less competitive to appease our new President. In what world is a car company deciding to cancel $1.6 billion in investment for the future and replace it with only $700 billion of investment a good thing?
This may have nothing to do with the new administration. Ford could have simply realized they couldn't justify $1.6 billion in investment for new facilities, and needed to be more cautious by enhancing current factories. But if they really did make this decision because of fear of tariffs, we are already starting to see some of the worst consequences of protectionism. American companies being coerced to decrease efficiency to appease those who oppose the modernization of our workforce cannot be considered a win for anyone concerned about the long term economic health of our country.
All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning
Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.
Considering the solution to the solar power deficiency being discussed was to use non-solar to fill in the gaps, it is clear I didn't even suggest the problems with solar energy are always solved by more solar energy. I didn't say the problems with solar energy don't exist, just that they are easily solvable. Cost is the only significant hindrance in all but the most extreme cases, and it is becoming less of an issue every year.
In summary, evening is okay, cloudy weeks aren't
Peaking power plants typically run at under 10% utilization year round. During cloudy days these typically natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels. Combine that with the fact that typical solar panels still run at around 20% efficiency with dense cloud cover you could reduce the number of traditional power plants by at least a factor of 10 by replacing them with solar plants. And this is without trying to store electricity as an alternative.
All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable and most are hardly even worth mentioning, other than to refute myths that is.
Well, you do realize, that capacity (natgas or whatever) sitting idle (not making money) is seriously expensive, right?
Peaking power plants, or power plants that generally only run when there is high demand, are generally gas turbines that burn natural gas. It is common for peaker plants to run only a few hours a day with well under 10% capacity. This is not a new problem. Electricity storage continues to become cheaper and as time goes on there will be less need for these types of power plants, but we have them now and could build more if they help us transition to more renewable energy sources.
China knows about real costs, and they are building new coal plants at about 1 a week.
China is overbuilding unnecessary coal plants for the same reason they are overbuilding everywhere else. Cheap money and perverse incentives. Their coal plants are already operating at below 50% capacity. Their coal consumption has dropped for the past two years and the drop is accelerating.
Worst case scenario you can use natural gas then (or other renewable options like hydro and geothermal). Best case scenario is battery technology is also cheap enough that it becomes more widespread. This isn't a tough question.
If rich people/corporations don't hire people because it's not cost effective then people won't have money and can't buy from them. People will figure out how to live without money, money will become worthless, and rich people will have nothing.
That is a real concern, but not one any corporations have the ability to solve. Any company proactive enough to try would find themselves noncompetitive and would fail earlier than if they had not tried to solve this issue. The tragedy of the commons applies to large corporations as well.
This is only something which can be solved by society, aka government. We need a large consumer base to provide enough incentive for a select few to continue innovating and pushing society forward. Soon income redistribution will be the only way to maintain this large consumer base.
Then again, tell me of how companies are going to make money to service the stakeholders when there are not people around wh ocan buy their highly profitable wares?
Which is why a basic income is nearly inevitable. The tragedy of the commons ensures the solution will never come from companies.
Welcome to the endgame of supply side only outlook. As humanity is drug down by lack of access, the job creators will prey upon each other. That might look more like The Hunger Games world
Without massive income redistribution, it will most likely it will look like the feudal systems of the past. The wealthy will continue to live very affluent lives while everyone else lives in poverty. Growth will slow to a crawl since there aren't enough consumers to fuel our current innovative economic engine, so it will stay this way for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it doesn't come to this in the first place.
Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.
But the consistent trend over the past 30 years is that many blue collar workers put out of work by automation and to a lesser extent outsourcing have not found new industries. Worker participation rates among those age 25-54 have dropped from about 85% to 81% in the past 15 years, and even if this rather gradual shift continues you will see another few million people unemployable in the next decade or two.
This is without meaningful advances in AI having much affect; it's just a continuation of the automation we have been seeing for the past few decades. During the 90's we were creating new jobs even faster than they were lost, but the low hanging fruit is long gone. More recent dangers to existing jobs, like customer service bots and self driving cars, require far less capital expenditure than previous technologies like factory automation. Instead of our economy having a few decades to slowly adjust to the loss of manufacturing jobs, our economy may have less than a decade to adjust to the loss of 10's of millions of customer service and professional driving jobs.
Those who are worried about the potential loss of jobs from AI are not just making up their predictions from thin air. They are looking at the trends of the past few decades and not seeing much encouragement there.
Silly face filters need to die
I on the other hand hope your capacity for childhood whimsy can live again someday. Nearly everything I do with my two year old daughter could be considered childish, unmanly, unproductive, etc by curmudgeons like you, but I am glad not everyone shares your bleak view on what forms of entertainment are acceptable. Watching my daughter laugh as her tongue becomes huge in the phone screen is a damn good use of my time, IMHO, and my family members asking for more snap-chats like that seem to agree.
I also can get a good laugh at my young sister and brother in law dancing at a New Year's party with silly filters on their faces, so I don't think childish fun only applies to interactions with toddlers either.
You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts.
Actually yes it does. The history of the blitzkrieg is not one of France quickly adapting to new technologies and strategies to repel the German invaders. It is of France's Maginot line being mostly useless in the war and Germany capturing Paris with ease. Something neither side could accomplish in over four years in the previous war was accomplished in around two months using the new paradigm.
Will human participation in the workforce adapt to AI technologies in the next 50 years? Almost certainly. Is it likely to cause disruption unlike anything our species has seen before? Almost certainly. Will human participation in the workforce never again resemble the levels we see today? Entirely possible.
It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.
The buggy whip story shows that an entire species which had significant economic value for thousands of years found that technology had finally reached a point where they weren't needed. Instead of needing 20 million of them working in our economy in 1920, by 1960 there were only about 4.5 million. While they were able to take advantage of the previous technological revolutions and become even more useful because of better technology in the past, most horses could not survive the invention of the automobile.
The human intellect has enabled our species to keep up with technology for at least 100 years longer than arguably the second most productive work bearing species in our economy, but that doesn't mean we will forever. Most likely the fate of the horse in the early 1900's gives us a good view of what will happen to human workforce participation in the next 50 years. Around 9 million horses are still part of our economy today, but if horses had kept up with humans in our economy there would be more like 60 million.
Using the automobile revolution as a guide for what will happen in the AI revolution, human working age workforce participation could be at 15% in 40 years.
40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined.
Of this we have no disagreement. But these new companies will continue to need less people to do the work. The oldest 5 companies to be added to the DJIA employ 1900 people per $1 billion in revenue. The newest 5 companies require only 1100 employees. Looking at the 10 largest companies by market cap, the companies founded in the last 50 years require 1270 employees per $1 billion in revenue. The companies founded earlier than that (all three of them founded over 100 years ago) require 1850 employees.
You may not see the people being displaced by these changes already, but we all heard them loud and clear during the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns. Unfortunately their rage is misplaced towards outsourcing when the real culprit is a technologically advanced economy that doesn't need their skills anymore. Not enough to justify living wages in their society that is.
Customer service bots and automated vehicles alone have the capability of displacing 10's of millions of workers in a very short time. Whether we look at 100 years ago or just this century so far, it is clear we won't find new industries for many if not most of these workers.
You may have a better imagination than me, but a belief in Santa Claus doesn't make him real.
As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.
People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.
Apparently because you are horrible at determining what is entertaining to most people. I have seen all six of the films mentioned in the summary (although only three of them in theaters) and found them all very fun to watch. The six films had an average Meta-critic score of 73 and a Meta-critic user score of 7.3, so it appears the critics and the movie goers had nearly the same reactions to the movies.
As another comment pointed out, movies and TV are generally the entertainment equivalent of eating pizza and hamburgers. Life is too short to be so pretentious about what forms of fun are better than others.