robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
Yeah, you're not aware of how automated food production is, are you? Sure, that hand-tossed, wood fired pizza you're getting is not going to be done by a robot anytime soon. But Tombstone and Red Barron pizzas haven't been hand assembled in decades. The same goes for all the processed food you find in the store. Bread, pasta, frozen dinners, anything that comes in a cardboard box, can, or jar probably has never been touched by human hands. The only exception is that some of the veg might have been picked by migrant workers.
Now, what does the vast proportion of the US population eat? All that stuff. Maybe you're like me and have the money, skills, and time to buy fresh ingredients and make stuff by hand, or go out to nice restaurants. But nobody is filling frozen burritos by hand, stuffing cheap sausage or hot dogs, or hand making 99% of the bread that gets eaten.
There is still a future of places where people are needed.
I'd like to know where/what that that is. Because everything I can think of our truck drivers, cabbies, food service workers, warehouse workers, service industry folks, and office drones doing instead of their jobs is also getting automated. What can't be done better and cheaper than automation and machine learning that can employ millions of people?
Let's suppose the trend does end: Who will buy your automatically produced goods if nobody has any money to do so?
That's exactly why so many of us are worried about the rapid rise of automation and machine learning! As the AC below noted, it's likely to cause massive economic issues as this picks up speed.
Does that mean we have less demand for mathematician jobs than we otherwise would? You bet. But instead the mathematicians we do have are now solving more complex problems, and are overall more wealthy than they would have been if there weren't computers.
That's a cute analogy, but it doesn't cover the millions and millions of people that are going to be out of work in the next 10-15 years. Computers and switchboards only impacted very narrow job categories that not a lot of people were doing. There are millions and millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers, and factory workers. Cashiers and cabbies, maids and a massive service industry. Large portions of the bureaucratic systems of millions of offices and government are going to be replaced by machine learning. Our agriculture industry is booming, with less and less labor involved. Retirements and bleak job outlooks driving people away will buffer the impact a little, but the disruption is already here, and it's picking up steam.
We have millions of blue collar jobs that are going to be automated out of existence pretty soon. But the white collar jobs are also going to get automated. So what's the solution for the blue collar job folks? What do they do that can't also be automated cheaper and better?
I'm glad my dad, the straight D high school student, was wise enough to understand this. Yep, he pushed us kids to get a good education, and we've got 7 college degrees between 3 kids to show for it. Also the closest we live to that little town is an hour away. I'm a thousand miles away.
I don't keep up with my HS classmates anymore, because nothing has changed for them in the last two decades save more kids and more poverty. They still revel in the glory days of winning touchdowns and prom parties, while I'm flying around the country on business and exploring different cities.
I don't know how the town I grew up in is still there. I don't understand how it functions economically. Well, I guess I do. Families live in the same house for generations, long paid off. Hardly anyone buys new vehicles, and everyone spends their free time doing odd jobs and farming to make extra money. Dad has a big vegetable garden and beehives. Barters fish and game for favors and services. Gives Dale up the road a couple gallons of honey and ten pounds of venison and Dale drops of a dump truck of wood from the lot he's clearing, which dad cuts and splits.
Not a lot of leisure time, and always one step from economic disaster. The house my great grandparents bought when they immigrated to the country has been a hole in a ground for about a decade now. (Not owned by our family in a generation.) A former classmate was renting it and burned it down. The owners didn't have it insured, and don't have any money to replace it, so it's an overgrown hole in the ground now. It's not the only one either. Steady uptick of houses falling into disrepair and trailers replacing them. Trailers with mortgages, because there wasn't enough money for maintenance on the old house.
It's hard to be sad when these towns finally die, because they are literally falling down. If you don't have enough money to fix your roof, the solution isn't to get a mortgage on a trailer so you don't have to change your way of life. The solution is to retrain, reskill, and improve your quality of life. My family history is mining, machine shops, and dairy farming. My siblings and I have STEM degrees, plenty of employment options, and make very good money. Those people still trying to hang onto the past are missing out on life. I just don't get why refusal to change for the better is a thing.
You just summarized why I finally stopped buying MBPs. Last one was 2012, and since then I just haven't been able to justify a new one. This latest MBP crop made it clear that Apple is going full steam in a direction that I'm not interested in going.
I have precious enough time to myself without having to fight my computer.
I was at this point up until recently with OS X. But lately, it's been more and more of a fight. Or to be more accurate, giving up because fighting it is fairly impossible. If you're OK with how OS X is doing things, all is well. But if you're not OK with it, there is very little you can do.
I don't use iCloud, and I'm not going to. But after the most recent update, I get prompted to log into it all the time, despite disabling everything that is tied to it, and trying to disable it. There is nothing in iCloud, and I'm not using iCloud. So why is it popping a prompt up on an irregular basis while I'm trying to do other things, and sometimes stealing focus?
Between annoying crap like that and the lack of MBP updates over the last 5 years, I gave up and went Dell Precision with Ubuntu. I'm plenty happy with that decision so far. Because if I don't like something in Ubuntu, I can change it. It also came working out of the box, with all the drivers, so I skipped the pain of getting all the hardware working in the first place. So far I'm pretty happy.
I was pretty much solidly in your camp up until this year. Ran linux for computing and on the desktop, always had a MBP. The MB line are solidly built laptops, and last forever. The "guest" computer is closing in on a decade old now and still going strong. Not bad for a laptop.
Since 2012 I've been waiting to upgrade my MBP, but every iteration since then has been flat or a downgrade. Finally gave up and spent the same $ for a Dell Precision with Ubuntu and got 2x the hardware. And you know what? I really, really like that machine.
It's not as shiny as MBP aluminum and OS X, but it's pretty darn good. Thinner and lighter, quieter than what it replaced, and it's got a real graphics card in it.
That said, I rsynced my files over from the MBP, which was just beautiful. Once you learn to Unix, it's hard to consider doing Windows.
I'm paid largely to put out fires. When there are no fires, I work on process and documentation to ensure that there are less fires in the future. But there are definite times when I'm juggling several issues, and I'm waiting for more information or a decision from leadership on those issues. At that point, I don't have much to do. There's really not time to pick up the process and documentation work, as that's time-consuming, and it's 100% guaranteed to be interrupted by the evolution of the ongoing issues.
So during those lulls, I dick around on the internet, work on my own projects, go for a walk, or wander off early to grab a beer somewhere.
I don't get paid for what I produce. I get paid for fire prevention services. If there is no emergency I need to respond to, that means I'm being successful at my job. If there are less emergencies as time goes on, I'm doing an awesome job. And if all of the current issues are at a point where someone else needs to do something, it's thumb-twiddling time.
As a salaried employee who's job it is to do something other than produce, I don't feel the need to be doing something every minute I'm at work. If I pick up anything, it needs to be droppable at a minute's notice, when I have to go back to putting out fires. That's not conducive to most of the stuff that needs to get done around here, and it's far worse for people who need that done if there's no way for me to guarantee when I can get to it. If it's on my plate, it's not on somebody else's plate, and they're much more likely to get to it in a timely fashion than I am.
My value is in being responsive. Idle time is part and parcel of being able to be responsive.
A criminal record is documentation that you committed a crime. If you broke the law sneaking across the border, you do not have a criminal record. Have you committed a crime? Yes. Is it documented? No. Not until a LEA picks you up and charges you with committing that crime.
...but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat.
Except that's not always the case. We don't do it sometimes, see the various plagues and incurable infections like HIV, and in other cases, our bodies fuck this process up, and create for themselves autoimmune diseases. There are a surprisingly large number of autoimmune diseases out there, some minor and some debilitating and deadly, and these are the result of our bodies screwing up this process of developing antibodies.
Even as we can replicate this process better, we're going to have to be very careful that we're not causing issues like these. Last thing we want is to start injecting people with cold and flu antibodies that turn out to be a latent T-virus.
As a vague theme along what is being described here, I don't see why that's a bad assumption. Most technological innovations have been about shifting where human labor is applied. What we're talking about here is outright replacing it. Anywhere it could get pushed to, we can replace that with robots too.
We're not too far off from robots handling almost all commercial agriculture, and almost all packing, shipping and delivery. Our robots will build other robots, and other robots will service those robots. Or just recycle them so the first group can rebuild more robots.
Robots already make a tremendous amount of the food we eat - if it's pre-packaged in the store, good chance that human hands never touched it. Self-serve kiosks, touchless carwashes, Siri, tax prep software, ATMs and online banking, etc., etc., etc.
We've still got our fingers in the art pie, at least for a bit now. Although we can now synth entire orchestras well enough for movies and video games that even those are getting squeezed. It will be a bit before we have robot opera singers and ballet dancers, painters and graphic designers. But how many people do these things?
What jobs are there for the tens of millions of people who drive something for a living? Who work in the food service industry? Who work in investment and tax fields? Law? When machine learning does a better job of medical analysis, do we still train doctors to do that work? Do we still need that many doctors?
It's not going to be a fast shift, but this isn't like the other technical advances in history. I honestly don't know what jobs people losing their jobs to automation are going to find. Because anything I can think of could likely be done better and cheaper by a robot.
I pretty much guarantee you that you spent more time setting that mode up, then I'd ever get back using it.
I'm about break-even on my Hue bulbs. It took awhile to set them up to mimic a sunrise in the morning, and a sunset in the evening. Living decently far north, I find it's really helpful during the winter to have a stable sunrise and sunset despite the darkness outside. I've had the same settings for 2-3 years now, and it's really, really nice. I wake before my alarm most mornings, and as the house "sunsets", it triggers me to go to bed at the same time every night.
But some time ago they released an "improved" Hue app, and while it's much simpler to use, I don't see a way to recreate what I spent a lot of time setting up. I ended up having to revert to the old one and fix a bunch of lost settings. That was a definite time-sink. And that's even with disallowing my IoT light system to access the broader internet. It's isolated on my network, and I just let one phone update its app.
And that's the other problem with IoT things - even when you have them set the way you want them, there's no guarantee that the company that you're relying on to allow you to manage them will keep them in the same state. Cue the time-sink and tinkering, to try to get what you want out of them.
The bulbs I bought and programmed were for a distinct need, and they fill that need. I have yet to find anything else in the IoT that falls into that category.
Managers telecommute? Are you kidding? You must never have worked from home.
When I do, I tend to get 8 hrs of work done the first 4-5 hrs, and then start looking for other stuff to do. If a manager did that, office productivity would be destroyed before anyone could figure out what happened.
I can't imagine the horrors that would be produced if a manager had tons of free time and peace and quiet to think about efficiency and team building. It's far better that they be busy most of the time talking to a groups of people in the office, because at least then, they're only impacting those people.
We used Wunderlist for a while in the same way. The problem is that the dry-erase board on the fridge is always the closest thing when we discover we're out of something, so it gets jotted down there. Phones are often in another room. Then we were trying to remember to update Wunderlist from the board on the fridge, but that was 2x the data entry. So now we just snap a picture of the dry-erase board when we're headed out. And text the picture to each other if needed. It...actually is easier than any of the other options.
I don't think 'freshly unemployed truckers' is going to be that much of a problem. It's not 875,000 people all at once. It's more likely going to ramp up over those 15 years, but that's a lot of time.
How many drivers will retire in that time? For every one that retires, you just won't need to hire a new one. It's not a job lost, unless you somewhat disingenuously call "I would like a job in that profession but can't find one" a lost job.
How many people considering trucking are going to look at the automation and decide that it's not a viable career path? Again, not really jobs lost.
Buggy whip makers didn't immediately go out of business when the Model T rolled off the lines. Like most change, truck driving will likely be a slow decline with a few dramatic drops as major businesses change over wholesale.
Just guessing, but UPS and FedEX are huge shipping companies, and I bet the first automation there won't replace the employee in the truck, because there still won't be a way to get the package to the door. However, that package handler could be relegated to the passenger seat. Just jumping out to deliver and jumping back in. The truck knows what's in the back, where it needs to drop it off, the road conditions and traffic, and picks the most efficient route. Not a job lost, but likely one that gets a reduction in pay, because the the reduction in job duties.
Carpooling is ok, but thinking about where I live, I'd totally go for owning a self-driving car. My wife works about 10 minutes from home, I work about 20-25, depending on traffic. She leaves a half hour before I do, gets home a half hour before I do. Car could drop her off at work, come home, get me, drop me off at work, go home, and park in the driveway. 10 minutes before she heads out of work she can summon it, and it will take her home. Then 20 minutes before I want it, I call it. Or I go grab a beer if she's going somewhere.
No street parking, no lot parking, no real need for 2 cars, no adjusting the seat, no sharing with strangers. If she's going to be at the yoga for an hour, the car can come get me, drop me off at home, and head back to yoga.
I think this means a bit more congestion on the road, however. This should be mitigated by the auto-driving capabilities, and can be further mitigated by reclaiming parking for more lanes. We'd need a small fraction of the metered spots if cars could go park a little further away, and they could park in dense clusters, because they could move when one needed to get out.
Several years ago my wife made a series of DIY crafty things involving cute animals. Probably 30-50 videos, 5-15 minutes each, and i'm guessing it was 2012-2014 or so. I don't know that she topped 1k subscribers, and she hasn't added a thing since.
She made $1k last year on ad revenue. That blows my mind.
I think you both just typed past each other, missing each other's point.
I get that you were lampooning "the sky is falling" posts, but you picked a lot of examples that, historically, pushed a lot of people out of their jobs. You know, like the "robots are coming" folks are talking about happening.
I passed a construction site this morning, and a dozen or so men were ripping up a block of two-lane city streets. I watched 2 guys in backhoes dump tons of materials into two dump-trucks (2 guys), while 4 more guys worked in the holes to uncover sewer and power lines, while 2 more guys supervised and 2 more directed traffic. They'll be done with that block by tomorrow.
A century ago it would have taken many times more men many times longer to do that same work. Check out the photos from depression-era make-work programs. There are huge numbers of guys with shovels in those photos. Today, there are a dozen guys, and only 2-3 of them have shovels. Many of your other comments show the same disregard for advancement at the cost of human jobs. "My boss sent an email" used to take a secretary, a memo pad, and a mail-boy to accomplish. A vending machine replaces several human vendors. Keurig and automated coffee and soda machines have replaced soda fountain workers.
The point that you seem to be missing, that your counterpart didn't do a great job of explaining, is that the speed of mechanization and automation is increasing, while the transition to other jobs isn't happening at all in many cases, and not fast enough to make up for the losses in the rest. The money made off this mechanization and automation isn't being reinvested into the workplace, and that's creating a wealth disparity unlike any we've seen in at least a century, if not longer.
Have you read anything about the white despair that's starting to get noticed? For the first time, the death rate of non-college-educated, middle-aged whites is starting to dramatically increase. The reasons are drug overdoses and suicides. Why? Because the mining, factory, and farming jobs they used to have are either outsourced or mechanized and automated. There is nothing left for them to do. They can't join the service industry because nobody around them has any money to spend on it.
What now for these folks? They're already desperate enough to kill themselves slowly with drugs or quickly with a gun. They're in their 40s and 50s, and could live for another 30 years, if they had something to live for.
"The sky is falling, ROBOTS!" that you're lampooning is already impacting people, even if you don't see it. While I agree that it's overhyped, it's very real, and the problems it's already causing are just going to grow worse, and rather quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
robochefs are still a novelty, at best making a "custom" pizza.
Yeah, you're not aware of how automated food production is, are you? Sure, that hand-tossed, wood fired pizza you're getting is not going to be done by a robot anytime soon. But Tombstone and Red Barron pizzas haven't been hand assembled in decades. The same goes for all the processed food you find in the store. Bread, pasta, frozen dinners, anything that comes in a cardboard box, can, or jar probably has never been touched by human hands. The only exception is that some of the veg might have been picked by migrant workers.
Now, what does the vast proportion of the US population eat? All that stuff. Maybe you're like me and have the money, skills, and time to buy fresh ingredients and make stuff by hand, or go out to nice restaurants. But nobody is filling frozen burritos by hand, stuffing cheap sausage or hot dogs, or hand making 99% of the bread that gets eaten.
There is still a future of places where people are needed.
I'd like to know where/what that that is. Because everything I can think of our truck drivers, cabbies, food service workers, warehouse workers, service industry folks, and office drones doing instead of their jobs is also getting automated. What can't be done better and cheaper than automation and machine learning that can employ millions of people?
Let's suppose the trend does end: Who will buy your automatically produced goods if nobody has any money to do so?
That's exactly why so many of us are worried about the rapid rise of automation and machine learning! As the AC below noted, it's likely to cause massive economic issues as this picks up speed.
Does that mean we have less demand for mathematician jobs than we otherwise would? You bet. But instead the mathematicians we do have are now solving more complex problems, and are overall more wealthy than they would have been if there weren't computers.
That's a cute analogy, but it doesn't cover the millions and millions of people that are going to be out of work in the next 10-15 years. Computers and switchboards only impacted very narrow job categories that not a lot of people were doing. There are millions and millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers, and factory workers. Cashiers and cabbies, maids and a massive service industry. Large portions of the bureaucratic systems of millions of offices and government are going to be replaced by machine learning. Our agriculture industry is booming, with less and less labor involved. Retirements and bleak job outlooks driving people away will buffer the impact a little, but the disruption is already here, and it's picking up steam.
We have millions of blue collar jobs that are going to be automated out of existence pretty soon. But the white collar jobs are also going to get automated. So what's the solution for the blue collar job folks? What do they do that can't also be automated cheaper and better?
I'm glad my dad, the straight D high school student, was wise enough to understand this. Yep, he pushed us kids to get a good education, and we've got 7 college degrees between 3 kids to show for it. Also the closest we live to that little town is an hour away. I'm a thousand miles away.
I don't keep up with my HS classmates anymore, because nothing has changed for them in the last two decades save more kids and more poverty. They still revel in the glory days of winning touchdowns and prom parties, while I'm flying around the country on business and exploring different cities.
I don't know how the town I grew up in is still there. I don't understand how it functions economically. Well, I guess I do. Families live in the same house for generations, long paid off. Hardly anyone buys new vehicles, and everyone spends their free time doing odd jobs and farming to make extra money. Dad has a big vegetable garden and beehives. Barters fish and game for favors and services. Gives Dale up the road a couple gallons of honey and ten pounds of venison and Dale drops of a dump truck of wood from the lot he's clearing, which dad cuts and splits.
Not a lot of leisure time, and always one step from economic disaster. The house my great grandparents bought when they immigrated to the country has been a hole in a ground for about a decade now. (Not owned by our family in a generation.) A former classmate was renting it and burned it down. The owners didn't have it insured, and don't have any money to replace it, so it's an overgrown hole in the ground now. It's not the only one either. Steady uptick of houses falling into disrepair and trailers replacing them. Trailers with mortgages, because there wasn't enough money for maintenance on the old house.
It's hard to be sad when these towns finally die, because they are literally falling down. If you don't have enough money to fix your roof, the solution isn't to get a mortgage on a trailer so you don't have to change your way of life. The solution is to retrain, reskill, and improve your quality of life. My family history is mining, machine shops, and dairy farming. My siblings and I have STEM degrees, plenty of employment options, and make very good money. Those people still trying to hang onto the past are missing out on life. I just don't get why refusal to change for the better is a thing.
You just summarized why I finally stopped buying MBPs. Last one was 2012, and since then I just haven't been able to justify a new one. This latest MBP crop made it clear that Apple is going full steam in a direction that I'm not interested in going.
I have precious enough time to myself without having to fight my computer.
I was at this point up until recently with OS X. But lately, it's been more and more of a fight. Or to be more accurate, giving up because fighting it is fairly impossible. If you're OK with how OS X is doing things, all is well. But if you're not OK with it, there is very little you can do.
I don't use iCloud, and I'm not going to. But after the most recent update, I get prompted to log into it all the time, despite disabling everything that is tied to it, and trying to disable it. There is nothing in iCloud, and I'm not using iCloud. So why is it popping a prompt up on an irregular basis while I'm trying to do other things, and sometimes stealing focus?
Between annoying crap like that and the lack of MBP updates over the last 5 years, I gave up and went Dell Precision with Ubuntu. I'm plenty happy with that decision so far. Because if I don't like something in Ubuntu, I can change it. It also came working out of the box, with all the drivers, so I skipped the pain of getting all the hardware working in the first place. So far I'm pretty happy.
I was pretty much solidly in your camp up until this year. Ran linux for computing and on the desktop, always had a MBP. The MB line are solidly built laptops, and last forever. The "guest" computer is closing in on a decade old now and still going strong. Not bad for a laptop.
Since 2012 I've been waiting to upgrade my MBP, but every iteration since then has been flat or a downgrade. Finally gave up and spent the same $ for a Dell Precision with Ubuntu and got 2x the hardware. And you know what? I really, really like that machine.
It's not as shiny as MBP aluminum and OS X, but it's pretty darn good. Thinner and lighter, quieter than what it replaced, and it's got a real graphics card in it.
That said, I rsynced my files over from the MBP, which was just beautiful. Once you learn to Unix, it's hard to consider doing Windows.
InoReader is awesome enough I shelled out the annual pro fee to support them. I don't want that one going away!
I'm paid largely to put out fires. When there are no fires, I work on process and documentation to ensure that there are less fires in the future. But there are definite times when I'm juggling several issues, and I'm waiting for more information or a decision from leadership on those issues. At that point, I don't have much to do. There's really not time to pick up the process and documentation work, as that's time-consuming, and it's 100% guaranteed to be interrupted by the evolution of the ongoing issues.
So during those lulls, I dick around on the internet, work on my own projects, go for a walk, or wander off early to grab a beer somewhere.
I don't get paid for what I produce. I get paid for fire prevention services. If there is no emergency I need to respond to, that means I'm being successful at my job. If there are less emergencies as time goes on, I'm doing an awesome job. And if all of the current issues are at a point where someone else needs to do something, it's thumb-twiddling time.
As a salaried employee who's job it is to do something other than produce, I don't feel the need to be doing something every minute I'm at work. If I pick up anything, it needs to be droppable at a minute's notice, when I have to go back to putting out fires. That's not conducive to most of the stuff that needs to get done around here, and it's far worse for people who need that done if there's no way for me to guarantee when I can get to it. If it's on my plate, it's not on somebody else's plate, and they're much more likely to get to it in a timely fashion than I am.
My value is in being responsive. Idle time is part and parcel of being able to be responsive.
Does that not sound better than just letting them be on the street?
They'd be fine if we'd just spend the money on bootstraps for them. But no, we instead insist on entitlement handouts like this....
What? How are you modded insightful?
A criminal record is documentation that you committed a crime. If you broke the law sneaking across the border, you do not have a criminal record. Have you committed a crime? Yes. Is it documented? No. Not until a LEA picks you up and charges you with committing that crime.
This isn't fucking rocket surgery
Apparently to you it is...
Or if someone had invented "editors" and /. had decided to hire some.
Donald, go back to tweeting. You don't understand people outside the 1%, and most of what we talk about on this site is the cyber anyway.
...but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat.
Except that's not always the case. We don't do it sometimes, see the various plagues and incurable infections like HIV, and in other cases, our bodies fuck this process up, and create for themselves autoimmune diseases. There are a surprisingly large number of autoimmune diseases out there, some minor and some debilitating and deadly, and these are the result of our bodies screwing up this process of developing antibodies.
Even as we can replicate this process better, we're going to have to be very careful that we're not causing issues like these. Last thing we want is to start injecting people with cold and flu antibodies that turn out to be a latent T-virus.
As a vague theme along what is being described here, I don't see why that's a bad assumption. Most technological innovations have been about shifting where human labor is applied. What we're talking about here is outright replacing it. Anywhere it could get pushed to, we can replace that with robots too.
We're not too far off from robots handling almost all commercial agriculture, and almost all packing, shipping and delivery. Our robots will build other robots, and other robots will service those robots. Or just recycle them so the first group can rebuild more robots.
Robots already make a tremendous amount of the food we eat - if it's pre-packaged in the store, good chance that human hands never touched it. Self-serve kiosks, touchless carwashes, Siri, tax prep software, ATMs and online banking, etc., etc., etc.
We've still got our fingers in the art pie, at least for a bit now. Although we can now synth entire orchestras well enough for movies and video games that even those are getting squeezed. It will be a bit before we have robot opera singers and ballet dancers, painters and graphic designers. But how many people do these things?
What jobs are there for the tens of millions of people who drive something for a living? Who work in the food service industry? Who work in investment and tax fields? Law? When machine learning does a better job of medical analysis, do we still train doctors to do that work? Do we still need that many doctors?
It's not going to be a fast shift, but this isn't like the other technical advances in history. I honestly don't know what jobs people losing their jobs to automation are going to find. Because anything I can think of could likely be done better and cheaper by a robot.
I pretty much guarantee you that you spent more time setting that mode up, then I'd ever get back using it.
I'm about break-even on my Hue bulbs. It took awhile to set them up to mimic a sunrise in the morning, and a sunset in the evening. Living decently far north, I find it's really helpful during the winter to have a stable sunrise and sunset despite the darkness outside. I've had the same settings for 2-3 years now, and it's really, really nice. I wake before my alarm most mornings, and as the house "sunsets", it triggers me to go to bed at the same time every night.
But some time ago they released an "improved" Hue app, and while it's much simpler to use, I don't see a way to recreate what I spent a lot of time setting up. I ended up having to revert to the old one and fix a bunch of lost settings. That was a definite time-sink. And that's even with disallowing my IoT light system to access the broader internet. It's isolated on my network, and I just let one phone update its app.
And that's the other problem with IoT things - even when you have them set the way you want them, there's no guarantee that the company that you're relying on to allow you to manage them will keep them in the same state. Cue the time-sink and tinkering, to try to get what you want out of them.
The bulbs I bought and programmed were for a distinct need, and they fill that need. I have yet to find anything else in the IoT that falls into that category.
Managers telecommute? Are you kidding? You must never have worked from home.
When I do, I tend to get 8 hrs of work done the first 4-5 hrs, and then start looking for other stuff to do. If a manager did that, office productivity would be destroyed before anyone could figure out what happened.
I can't imagine the horrors that would be produced if a manager had tons of free time and peace and quiet to think about efficiency and team building. It's far better that they be busy most of the time talking to a groups of people in the office, because at least then, they're only impacting those people.
We used Wunderlist for a while in the same way. The problem is that the dry-erase board on the fridge is always the closest thing when we discover we're out of something, so it gets jotted down there. Phones are often in another room. Then we were trying to remember to update Wunderlist from the board on the fridge, but that was 2x the data entry. So now we just snap a picture of the dry-erase board when we're headed out. And text the picture to each other if needed. It...actually is easier than any of the other options.
I don't think 'freshly unemployed truckers' is going to be that much of a problem. It's not 875,000 people all at once. It's more likely going to ramp up over those 15 years, but that's a lot of time.
How many drivers will retire in that time? For every one that retires, you just won't need to hire a new one. It's not a job lost, unless you somewhat disingenuously call "I would like a job in that profession but can't find one" a lost job.
How many people considering trucking are going to look at the automation and decide that it's not a viable career path? Again, not really jobs lost.
Buggy whip makers didn't immediately go out of business when the Model T rolled off the lines. Like most change, truck driving will likely be a slow decline with a few dramatic drops as major businesses change over wholesale.
Just guessing, but UPS and FedEX are huge shipping companies, and I bet the first automation there won't replace the employee in the truck, because there still won't be a way to get the package to the door. However, that package handler could be relegated to the passenger seat. Just jumping out to deliver and jumping back in. The truck knows what's in the back, where it needs to drop it off, the road conditions and traffic, and picks the most efficient route. Not a job lost, but likely one that gets a reduction in pay, because the the reduction in job duties.
Carpooling is ok, but thinking about where I live, I'd totally go for owning a self-driving car. My wife works about 10 minutes from home, I work about 20-25, depending on traffic. She leaves a half hour before I do, gets home a half hour before I do. Car could drop her off at work, come home, get me, drop me off at work, go home, and park in the driveway. 10 minutes before she heads out of work she can summon it, and it will take her home. Then 20 minutes before I want it, I call it. Or I go grab a beer if she's going somewhere.
No street parking, no lot parking, no real need for 2 cars, no adjusting the seat, no sharing with strangers. If she's going to be at the yoga for an hour, the car can come get me, drop me off at home, and head back to yoga.
I think this means a bit more congestion on the road, however. This should be mitigated by the auto-driving capabilities, and can be further mitigated by reclaiming parking for more lanes. We'd need a small fraction of the metered spots if cars could go park a little further away, and they could park in dense clusters, because they could move when one needed to get out.
Several years ago my wife made a series of DIY crafty things involving cute animals. Probably 30-50 videos, 5-15 minutes each, and i'm guessing it was 2012-2014 or so. I don't know that she topped 1k subscribers, and she hasn't added a thing since.
She made $1k last year on ad revenue. That blows my mind.
Maybe a IoT sensor that senses i I've been on the couch to long and tells me to "get offf the couch and do something, ya lazy douch!"
That's called a fitbit.
I'm going to start a business (in Delaware, of course) that sells a VPN based in MN if this passes.
Most, but not all. What's the betting line on which category this app falls into?
I'm curious....what about what I wrote above struck you as silly?
I think you both just typed past each other, missing each other's point.
I get that you were lampooning "the sky is falling" posts, but you picked a lot of examples that, historically, pushed a lot of people out of their jobs. You know, like the "robots are coming" folks are talking about happening.
I passed a construction site this morning, and a dozen or so men were ripping up a block of two-lane city streets. I watched 2 guys in backhoes dump tons of materials into two dump-trucks (2 guys), while 4 more guys worked in the holes to uncover sewer and power lines, while 2 more guys supervised and 2 more directed traffic. They'll be done with that block by tomorrow.
A century ago it would have taken many times more men many times longer to do that same work. Check out the photos from depression-era make-work programs. There are huge numbers of guys with shovels in those photos. Today, there are a dozen guys, and only 2-3 of them have shovels. Many of your other comments show the same disregard for advancement at the cost of human jobs. "My boss sent an email" used to take a secretary, a memo pad, and a mail-boy to accomplish. A vending machine replaces several human vendors. Keurig and automated coffee and soda machines have replaced soda fountain workers.
The point that you seem to be missing, that your counterpart didn't do a great job of explaining, is that the speed of mechanization and automation is increasing, while the transition to other jobs isn't happening at all in many cases, and not fast enough to make up for the losses in the rest. The money made off this mechanization and automation isn't being reinvested into the workplace, and that's creating a wealth disparity unlike any we've seen in at least a century, if not longer.
Have you read anything about the white despair that's starting to get noticed? For the first time, the death rate of non-college-educated, middle-aged whites is starting to dramatically increase. The reasons are drug overdoses and suicides. Why? Because the mining, factory, and farming jobs they used to have are either outsourced or mechanized and automated. There is nothing left for them to do. They can't join the service industry because nobody around them has any money to spend on it.
What now for these folks? They're already desperate enough to kill themselves slowly with drugs or quickly with a gun. They're in their 40s and 50s, and could live for another 30 years, if they had something to live for.
"The sky is falling, ROBOTS!" that you're lampooning is already impacting people, even if you don't see it. While I agree that it's overhyped, it's very real, and the problems it's already causing are just going to grow worse, and rather quickly.