I think we could probably check back in 8 years and the trend will be clear.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
Second- the company that sells the robots will have at least a few orders of magnitude employment requirement as its customers. So we get one company with 10000 employees eliminating employment for 300,000 humans.
Third- A third of humans are only suited for dull and dirty jobs. I'll grant you the dangerous. Not everyone is qualified to be a rocket scientist. Not everyone is creative. Most people's jobs can be automated. It's just too expensive (for now) to do so. We are getting close to a tipping point and there is already an increasing number of about how a hospital eliminated 19 jobs and replaced them with robots or a company eliminated several hundred warehouse jobs and replaced them with robots.
Fourth- I like your point about robot enhancement. It's a good one. And for soldiers, capability is important (cost still matters). But fully robotic soldiers are cheaper, don't collect pensions, are cheaper to repair than humans, make much more political sense, and more capable in some situations. In line with that- there is a new security guard robot which is estimated to allow a 20:1 reduction in human security guards. I'd expect that a 20:1 reduction in human solders isn't going to be unreasonable.
Fifth, you have a good point here. The robots may not be ready as quickly as we estimate. It might be 35 to 40 years instead of 15 to 20 years before the issue becomes critical. Humans have a tendency to pull events closer. You can see it's going to happen so it seems like it's going to happen sooner than it really will.
Sixth, but it's not necessary to keep that tiny bit of creativity in the job. You take the 95% of the job which can be automated and do that. Then you assign the creative part to one new creative person and lay off 19 people. And in many cases, you may decide the creativity isn't profitable enough to keep. It's like having 5 brands of soap instead of the top selling 3 brands.
----
Look, this could all end well with 5% of humanity doing all the "required" work for the other 95% of humanity who are free to play, try to be creative (most will create trite or pointless junk), try to learn (most won't learn enough to be useful- the learning curve to usefulness is very high now), and enjoy life.
But if the 5% say, "We are doing all the work so we should get 100% of the benefits of society" then this is going to end ugly.
I can see your point that debugging will be an ongoing task.
I think the amount of debuggers employed will be over three orders of magnitude lower than the amount of workers replaced by the robots. And even then, it won't be cost effective to send most problems to them.
I think you are underestimating the "don't bother to repair" tendency. Quite simply- it's just cheaper to replace than repair most devices these days. There isn't as much value in repairing a $22,000 "Baxter" or a $30,000 Kiva as there is in repairing a $250,000 heavy industrial robot. And they are much more portable and easier to simply swap out.
For example-- your robot butler is behaving weird. If it's in the sub $3000 cost range (which is likely as a mass market product), after a couple attempts to fix it, the company will simply give you a new one. In most cases that is going to fix the problem and be cheaper than trying to figure out why it isn't working.
If they have a lot of returns for that particular problem, they might put a team on it if they are going to continue using that tech for their next robot series.
I'm not discounting your argument. Your particular car problem is a good example of the edge condition problems. But I've owned a half dozen cars and the mechanics haven't had a problem repairing anything since my 1964 ford fairlane. It wasn't computerized, had some issue with stalling. In the end, it was cheaper to just get rid of it and get a new car.
I've had multiple computers (15 to 20?) and only one problem of your type in 1998. Darned sound stopped working. It took a team of microsoft engineers- and 4 hours on the phone- and they finally figured out that the high end sound card was no longer after the recent update. It must have cost them hundreds of dollars to figure that out for me. I haven't had a problem like that since 2000... 14+ years.
What I'm saying is that most people don't have inexplicably stuck engine lights.
And my position isn't that robots and automation are going to eliminate jobs. Just that 20% of people who want to work, won't be able to find work-- even at poverty level wages-- because robots will be cheaper, faster, more accurate and unless we build a social safety net, we are going to have civil unrest and violence. (of course that ignores automation of higher end jobs-- that's probably another 10% who won't be be able to find stable employment).
I gave infosys a resume for a friend for a job that required a degree.
They bounced it back to me and said it needed to have her exact high school graduation date. Not the fact she had a high school degree. The date at which she was 17 or 18.
It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.
The problem and greatest risk comes long before that point.
Once "a large portion but minority portion of humans are not requred" is the sticking point.
If 20% of your population that wants and needs to work can't find work, you are facing civil unrest and violence.
The current attitude in the united states is that only "lazy" people can't find work. It's "their fault they can't find work". If 60% of the population thinks and votes that way ("It's OUR money- don't TAX us- we want it ALL for ourselves") the 20% is going to get a bit irritable and it can do a lot of damage.
I think attitudes in some european countries are different. But the fact is the 1st world has had enough wealth to provide good basic food, entertainment, medical care, education and shelter to it's population without the requirement that they work for a long time.
In the US, education has actually become more expensive (cripplingly so due to "no bankruptcy laws passed in the late 90s). The social safety net (except for the ACA) has been consistently cut back since 1980.
On the "capitalist" front, living standards for the bottom 80% of society have been dropping since 1978. Only the fact that the wealthy own the media (including MSNBC and CNN) and fill them with constant and subtle "pro-wealthy" propaganda (yup- including MSNBC and CNN if you listen- at least a couple times an hour most days) explains why so many poor people back the wealthy to their own disadvantage.
I think we are nearing the end of capitalism as a national economic system. I'm sure capitalism will continue to exist but the foundational principle of exchanging your labor for pay is breaking down.
Exactly... And that's why we should count the three trillion dollars spent over the last decade to protect oil interests. If the oil companies actually had to pay for their own security, solar and alternative energy might be able to compete sooner.
The "rare" stuff will still be bid up by the 1% (like beach front property, ski lodges, premium meats, premium alcohols, etc.)
Essential problem is too many people. If we could bring the population down to 2 billion, most "rare" stuff would be plentiful. Not sure of any non-evil way to do that tho.
Okay, I can agree with you here. If they advertised a feature and it didn't work, they should fix it.
But without continuous security updates, only disconnected machines are really usable. And a disconnected machine loses most of the benefit of the internet.
And they'll be designed to make it easy to repair them. Hot swappable modules for each major component. Easily automatized repair. Most broken modules won't be repaired. The goal will be minimal downtime (we had contracts for under 4 hours unscheduled downtime per year). So that means the entire unit, or an entire module is swapped out and the unit is functional again.
Specialists cost money and are likely to only be used in the initial design, creation, and debugging of the robots (i.e. all the creative non-repetitive parts).
Our mainframes today already self analyze and even send emails saying they need a specific part replace. Heck- our automobiles tell repairmen what part is broken.
Think of robots as humans. So any argument about robots creating more human jobs is circular. Except for creative jobs.. for now.
(and the programs and automated system replacing "smart" but non creative human jobs are not usually a robot- but any human job that is repetative and doesn't involve creativity can be replaced. High paying jobs offer a higher payoff for replacing them. At my last company, they replaced nearly 400 product and marketing analysis people with a set of programs that were going to be maintained by a few programmers in india).
Robotic Grease Monkeys. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage. Robotic Robot Minders. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage. Robotic Charge Nurses. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage.
Jobs created. 72 member robotic design team. For one year. 12 member maintenance and patch team after that.
Dude, if robots didn't result in a net loss of employment, there would be no reason to buy them.
And robots are not automobiles. It's a paradigm shift. If you are a roboticist, you should be able to see that clearly.
With the Baxter (base cost $22000- can work 3 shifts- no vacations, holidays, no social security tax, no employment law compliance costs, "never" sick with a good SLA) and the
And others (including models that see better than humans and can throw and catch objects and have manual dexterity equal to humans) very close to production.
We are looking at machines that can replace ANY human that does repetitive manual work.
At the same time, legal work, actuarial work, and any other repetitive but non-creative is being automated from the top.
In 15 years, almost any non-creative job a human can do you will be able to automate at a cost lower than starvation / poverty level wages.
Robots are replacement humans- not automobiles. And their cost is already under $30,000 and dropping.
Tell that to the luddites who died homeless and starving.
Unless we have a share the wealth with all citizens-- then productivity gains and improved living standards only matter for those who "win" the lottery.
It's probably going to come to a head over the next 20 years. Once a country reaches 20% unemployment, it must help the poor or face civil unrest.
This *could* be a utopia-- but more likely is 1% will have 90% of everything and all the benefits of automation until the requirement that you share your labor to get a part of societies benefits goes away.
It's more be like having a car that people are actively sabotaging every single night. Or perhaps making a new key to steal it every night so you have to make a new key or replace the ignition switch every day.
They sold you a product and it worked as advertised. And if no one was trying to ruin/take control of it, it would be fine.
It's more like you are cheating on your wife. And your wife is cheating on you. And your best friend is cheating with and on both of you. And your parents are cheating on each other.
And snowden reveals that you are cheating.
And everyone else is outraged that you are cheating and uses it to gain an advantage over you.
Every country engages in espionage and breaks the law if it thinks it is justified / or even unjustified but certain it can get away with it.
Isreal spies on the U.S. and Germany spies on France and China spies on Russia.
I'd like to hire two or three 9's, a bunch of 7's and 8's. I'd put the 4's on help desk and in operations.
If I have too many 9's it's either going to blow out my budget or I'm going to have high turnover. Plus 9's tend to be prima donna's when it comes to lower status work. They also tend to be poor at maintenance and documentation.
I want some 9's to hand the "impossible" problems and to learn and introduce new technologies. But I want 7's to handle routine problems, follow procedures, and follow standards. The 4's are to filter and handle the 70% of the work which is mundane or scriptable so that the 7's and 9's are used effectively.
If I was a google- maybe i could afford to have all 9's. But not if I was most companies.
This is standard policy at most fortune 500 companies.
I was took a standard training course at Sysco foods and we were trained to interview every by asking for X identical "stories" and assigning the interview a rating for each story.
If the total rating was close, we were told explicitly we should hire the "most diverse candidate". I.e. a female over a male, a black over white, so a black female over a black male or a white female, etc.
And after all the training- the reality was that we didn't follow the training at all in the interviews. It was mostly nepotism and then desperately trying to get anyone remotely qualified to hire on (the company had and I think still has a TERRIBLE (and well deserved) reputation.
After working the internal staff for over 2 years at 72 hours a week, they laid 90% of them off and brought in Infosysm. Prior to that, they often worked the staff under sweatshop conditions whenever the economy turned down and jobs were hard to get.
The corp's main challenge was having a lilly white mostly male upper management and board (and even mostly the president and vp levels) in their mid to late 50's and I think that they were desperately trying to promote and develop diverse executive candidates.
But the training course is probably standard for most fortune 500 companies because it's legally defensible.
But the administration (who I voted for and otherwise support) and the NSA are full of people who were conducing what should be illegal and probably are unconstitutional US spying operations IN THE UNITED STATES.
The sad thing is- Snowden's actions will probably hurt us abroad and not do a thing to stop the fascist and creepy internal spying on U.S. citizens.
Once you get enough women, they start to club up and discriminate against men too. And there isn't a lawsuit/reeducation class to stop them.
I saw a manager filter through a half dozen male supervisors and end up with an entirely female supervisory staff in six months. She was always pissed off that they didn't communicate the same way she did. They were too direct and too black and white. She liked to give very "soft" commands. She would never give a direct order. She made a lot of "requests"- some of which later turned out to be orders while others were not.
Once she had a few female supervisors, they would go to lunch and exclude the males. At lunch, they would discuss business and project plans. Then later, she would bust the males for not knowing what was going on.
People tend to group up on some basis unless you actively discourage it. She and another female executive grouped up based on gender.
As recently as 1992- my cosc graduating classes was 90% white and 10% asian (not a single black). They were 90/10 male/female. Most the females who started the program bailed out and went to business computer degrees which were much easier.
Most the females who made it (in the 10%) didn't really like computers / eat / sleep / breath computers 24/7 like over half the remaining males did.
It has to be tough for any company to hire 12% blacks and 50% females under these conditions.
Welfare runs about 18,000 a year. Prison runs about 31,000 a year.
If you won't protect people over 45 from age discrimination (over two decades from retirement and social security) then you are going to end up supporting them on welfare or in prison.
Age discrimination has grown enormously since 2009 when SCOTUS gutted protection from age discrimination. Many companies now openly require the actual high school graduation date for positions that require advanced degrees. The ONLY reason you need that information is so that you know the age of the candidate. That should be made illegal immediately.
The minimum wage costs more than that due to the employer portion of social security (another 49 cents per hour) plus unemployment and other taxes (another 7 cents per hour).
The Baxter, a general purpose robot, has a base price of $22,000.
Many single purpose robots are under $2,500 dollars now. The new hospital robots are $19,600. And the Kiva warehouse robots fully implemented cost $30k to $40k.
Robots never get involved in worker's compensation suits. It never takes vacation. It doesn't require healthcare. It never protests working conditions.
--- The challenge is that when humans can't exchange hours of their life for food and shelter- how are our societies going to justify giving them food and shelter?
Because if we don't- the French Revolution is going to look like a picnic.
A lot of work that requires smart people doesn't need an ounce of creativity. All that work- however complex- can be automated. And the payoffs for doing so are huge.
For a lot of other work that requires human creativity it has already been shown such work can be done by machines once the initial spark of creativity has created the new approach.
I withdraw "ridiculous". You're just being really really blind.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we could probably check back in 8 years and the trend will be clear.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
Second- the company that sells the robots will have at least a few orders of magnitude employment requirement as its customers. So we get one company with 10000 employees eliminating employment for 300,000 humans.
Third- A third of humans are only suited for dull and dirty jobs. I'll grant you the dangerous. Not everyone is qualified to be a rocket scientist. Not everyone is creative. Most people's jobs can be automated. It's just too expensive (for now) to do so. We are getting close to a tipping point and there is already an increasing number of about how a hospital eliminated 19 jobs and replaced them with robots or a company eliminated several hundred warehouse jobs and replaced them with robots.
Fourth- I like your point about robot enhancement. It's a good one. And for soldiers, capability is important (cost still matters). But fully robotic soldiers are cheaper, don't collect pensions, are cheaper to repair than humans, make much more political sense, and more capable in some situations. In line with that- there is a new security guard robot which is estimated to allow a 20:1 reduction in human security guards. I'd expect that a 20:1 reduction in human solders isn't going to be unreasonable.
Fifth, you have a good point here. The robots may not be ready as quickly as we estimate. It might be 35 to 40 years instead of 15 to 20 years before the issue becomes critical. Humans have a tendency to pull events closer. You can see it's going to happen so it seems like it's going to happen sooner than it really will.
Sixth, but it's not necessary to keep that tiny bit of creativity in the job. You take the 95% of the job which can be automated and do that. Then you assign the creative part to one new creative person and lay off 19 people. And in many cases, you may decide the creativity isn't profitable enough to keep. It's like having 5 brands of soap instead of the top selling 3 brands.
----
Look, this could all end well with 5% of humanity doing all the "required" work for the other 95% of humanity who are free to play, try to be creative (most will create trite or pointless junk), try to learn (most won't learn enough to be useful- the learning curve to usefulness is very high now), and enjoy life.
But if the 5% say, "We are doing all the work so we should get 100% of the benefits of society" then this is going to end ugly.
I can see your point that debugging will be an ongoing task.
I think the amount of debuggers employed will be over three orders of magnitude lower than the amount of workers replaced by the robots. And even then, it won't be cost effective to send most problems to them.
I think you are underestimating the "don't bother to repair" tendency. Quite simply- it's just cheaper to replace than repair most devices these days. There isn't as much value in repairing a $22,000 "Baxter" or a $30,000 Kiva as there is in repairing a $250,000 heavy industrial robot. And they are much more portable and easier to simply swap out.
For example-- your robot butler is behaving weird. If it's in the sub $3000 cost range (which is likely as a mass market product), after a couple attempts to fix it, the company will simply give you a new one. In most cases that is going to fix the problem and be cheaper than trying to figure out why it isn't working.
If they have a lot of returns for that particular problem, they might put a team on it if they are going to continue using that tech for their next robot series.
I'm not discounting your argument. Your particular car problem is a good example of the edge condition problems. But I've owned a half dozen cars and the mechanics haven't had a problem repairing anything since my 1964 ford fairlane. It wasn't computerized, had some issue with stalling. In the end, it was cheaper to just get rid of it and get a new car.
I've had multiple computers (15 to 20?) and only one problem of your type in 1998. Darned sound stopped working. It took a team of microsoft engineers- and 4 hours on the phone- and they finally figured out that the high end sound card was no longer after the recent update. It must have cost them hundreds of dollars to figure that out for me. I haven't had a problem like that since 2000... 14+ years.
What I'm saying is that most people don't have inexplicably stuck engine lights.
And my position isn't that robots and automation are going to eliminate jobs. Just that 20% of people who want to work, won't be able to find work-- even at poverty level wages-- because robots will be cheaper, faster, more accurate and unless we build a social safety net, we are going to have civil unrest and violence. (of course that ignores automation of higher end jobs-- that's probably another 10% who won't be be able to find stable employment).
I gave infosys a resume for a friend for a job that required a degree.
They bounced it back to me and said it needed to have her exact high school graduation date. Not the fact she had a high school degree. The date at which she was 17 or 18.
It should be illegal to require a person's high school graduation date on a resume.
The problem and greatest risk comes long before that point.
Once "a large portion but minority portion of humans are not requred" is the sticking point.
If 20% of your population that wants and needs to work can't find work, you are facing civil unrest and violence.
The current attitude in the united states is that only "lazy" people can't find work. It's "their fault they can't find work". If 60% of the population thinks and votes that way ("It's OUR money- don't TAX us- we want it ALL for ourselves") the 20% is going to get a bit irritable and it can do a lot of damage.
I think attitudes in some european countries are different.
But the fact is the 1st world has had enough wealth to provide good basic food, entertainment, medical care, education and shelter to it's population without the requirement that they work for a long time.
In the US, education has actually become more expensive (cripplingly so due to "no bankruptcy laws passed in the late 90s). The social safety net (except for the ACA) has been consistently cut back since 1980.
On the "capitalist" front, living standards for the bottom 80% of society have been dropping since 1978. Only the fact that the wealthy own the media (including MSNBC and CNN) and fill them with constant and subtle "pro-wealthy" propaganda (yup- including MSNBC and CNN if you listen- at least a couple times an hour most days) explains why so many poor people back the wealthy to their own disadvantage.
I think we are nearing the end of capitalism as a national economic system. I'm sure capitalism will continue to exist but the foundational principle of exchanging your labor for pay is breaking down.
Exactly... And that's why we should count the three trillion dollars spent over the last decade to protect oil interests. If the oil companies actually had to pay for their own security, solar and alternative energy might be able to compete sooner.
Basic income is a good path out.
The "rare" stuff will still be bid up by the 1% (like beach front property, ski lodges, premium meats, premium alcohols, etc.)
Essential problem is too many people. If we could bring the population down to 2 billion, most "rare" stuff would be plentiful. Not sure of any non-evil way to do that tho.
Okay, I can agree with you here. If they advertised a feature and it didn't work, they should fix it.
But without continuous security updates, only disconnected machines are really usable. And a disconnected machine loses most of the benefit of the internet.
And they'll be designed to make it easy to repair them. Hot swappable modules for each major component. Easily automatized repair. Most broken modules won't be repaired.
The goal will be minimal downtime (we had contracts for under 4 hours unscheduled downtime per year). So that means the entire unit, or an entire module is swapped out and the unit is functional again.
Specialists cost money and are likely to only be used in the initial design, creation, and debugging of the robots (i.e. all the creative non-repetitive parts).
Our mainframes today already self analyze and even send emails saying they need a specific part replace. Heck- our automobiles tell repairmen what part is broken.
Think of robots as humans. So any argument about robots creating more human jobs is circular. Except for creative jobs.. for now.
(and the programs and automated system replacing "smart" but non creative human jobs are not usually a robot- but any human job that is repetative and doesn't involve creativity can be replaced. High paying jobs offer a higher payoff for replacing them. At my last company, they replaced nearly 400 product and marketing analysis people with a set of programs that were going to be maintained by a few programmers in india).
Hmmm.
And a year later
Robotic Grease Monkeys. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage.
Robotic Robot Minders. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage.
Robotic Charge Nurses. Cost savings over 66% vs minimum wage.
Jobs created.
72 member robotic design team. For one year.
12 member maintenance and patch team after that.
Dude, if robots didn't result in a net loss of employment, there would be no reason to buy them.
And robots are not automobiles. It's a paradigm shift. If you are a roboticist, you should be able to see that clearly.
With the Baxter (base cost $22000- can work 3 shifts- no vacations, holidays, no social security tax, no employment law compliance costs, "never" sick with a good SLA) and the
Kiva ($30,000 per unit- same benefits)
Robotic hamburger makers, robotic drink dispensers, ordering kiosks...
And others (including models that see better than humans and can throw and catch objects and have manual dexterity equal to humans) very close to production.
We are looking at machines that can replace ANY human that does repetitive manual work.
At the same time, legal work, actuarial work, and any other repetitive but non-creative is being automated from the top.
In 15 years, almost any non-creative job a human can do you will be able to automate at a cost lower than starvation / poverty level wages.
Robots are replacement humans- not automobiles. And their cost is already under $30,000 and dropping.
Tell that to the luddites who died homeless and starving.
Unless we have a share the wealth with all citizens-- then productivity gains and improved living standards only matter for those who "win" the lottery.
It's probably going to come to a head over the next 20 years. Once a country reaches 20% unemployment, it must help the poor or face civil unrest.
This *could* be a utopia-- but more likely is 1% will have 90% of everything and all the benefits of automation until the requirement that you share your labor to get a part of societies benefits goes away.
It's not quite the same.
It's more be like having a car that people are actively sabotaging every single night. Or perhaps making a new key to steal it every night so you have to make a new key or replace the ignition switch every day.
They sold you a product and it worked as advertised. And if no one was trying to ruin/take control of it, it would be fine.
I'm sorry... I should have said
"But the administration (who I voted for and otherwise support) " to make it clear I was talking about Obama.
To be fair...
It's more like you are cheating on your wife.
And your wife is cheating on you.
And your best friend is cheating with and on both of you.
And your parents are cheating on each other.
And snowden reveals that you are cheating.
And everyone else is outraged that you are cheating and uses it to gain an advantage over you.
Every country engages in espionage and breaks the law if it thinks it is justified / or even unjustified but certain it can get away with it.
Isreal spies on the U.S. and Germany spies on France and China spies on Russia.
It's just like fight club.. that's all.
I think of it more as "revealing the NSA are assholes" than "making the NSA look like assholes".
Grr. Sometimes I hate the inability to edit here.
"I was trained" ... Hmmm. Not quite what I mean to say. Ahhh. .. yes I like that better.
"I took a standard"
And the result was of course: "I was took a standard"...
Sigh...
I'd like to hire two or three 9's, a bunch of 7's and 8's. I'd put the 4's on help desk and in operations.
If I have too many 9's it's either going to blow out my budget or I'm going to have high turnover. Plus 9's tend to be prima donna's when it comes to lower status work. They also tend to be poor at maintenance and documentation.
I want some 9's to hand the "impossible" problems and to learn and introduce new technologies. But I want 7's to handle routine problems, follow procedures, and follow standards. The 4's are to filter and handle the 70% of the work which is mundane or scriptable so that the 7's and 9's are used effectively.
If I was a google- maybe i could afford to have all 9's. But not if I was most companies.
This is standard policy at most fortune 500 companies.
I was took a standard training course at Sysco foods and we were trained to interview every by asking for X identical "stories" and assigning the interview a rating for each story.
If the total rating was close, we were told explicitly we should hire the "most diverse candidate". I.e. a female over a male, a black over white, so a black female over a black male or a white female, etc.
And after all the training- the reality was that we didn't follow the training at all in the interviews. It was mostly nepotism and then desperately trying to get anyone remotely qualified to hire on (the company had and I think still has a TERRIBLE (and well deserved) reputation.
After working the internal staff for over 2 years at 72 hours a week, they laid 90% of them off and brought in Infosysm. Prior to that, they often worked the staff under sweatshop conditions whenever the economy turned down and jobs were hard to get.
The corp's main challenge was having a lilly white mostly male upper management and board (and even mostly the president and vp levels) in their mid to late 50's and I think that they were desperately trying to promote and develop diverse executive candidates.
But the training course is probably standard for most fortune 500 companies because it's legally defensible.
I hate to use FTFY...
So I won't.
But the administration (who I voted for and otherwise support) and the NSA are full of people who were conducing what should be illegal and probably are unconstitutional US spying operations IN THE UNITED STATES.
The sad thing is- Snowden's actions will probably hurt us abroad and not do a thing to stop the fascist and creepy internal spying on U.S. citizens.
Once you get enough women, they start to club up and discriminate against men too.
And there isn't a lawsuit/reeducation class to stop them.
I saw a manager filter through a half dozen male supervisors and end up with an entirely female supervisory staff in six months. She was always pissed off that they didn't communicate the same way she did. They were too direct and too black and white. She liked to give very "soft" commands. She would never give a direct order. She made a lot of "requests"- some of which later turned out to be orders while others were not.
Once she had a few female supervisors, they would go to lunch and exclude the males. At lunch, they would discuss business and project plans. Then later, she would bust the males for not knowing what was going on.
People tend to group up on some basis unless you actively discourage it. She and another female executive grouped up based on gender.
As recently as 1992- my cosc graduating classes was 90% white and 10% asian (not a single black). They were 90/10 male/female. Most the females who started the program bailed out and went to business computer degrees which were much easier.
Most the females who made it (in the 10%) didn't really like computers / eat / sleep / breath computers 24/7 like over half the remaining males did.
It has to be tough for any company to hire 12% blacks and 50% females under these conditions.
But 7 years.. what a joke.
The police in large cities tend to focus on the end of the month.
In Texas, the police can't keep the revenues any more- they must send them to the state. Which greatly reduced the enforcement in small towns.
It's going to be one or the other.
Welfare runs about 18,000 a year.
Prison runs about 31,000 a year.
If you won't protect people over 45 from age discrimination (over two decades from retirement and social security) then you are going to end up supporting them on welfare or in prison.
Age discrimination has grown enormously since 2009 when SCOTUS gutted protection from age discrimination. Many companies now openly require the actual high school graduation date for positions that require advanced degrees. The ONLY reason you need that information is so that you know the age of the candidate. That should be made illegal immediately.
The minimum wage costs more than that due to the employer portion of social security (another 49 cents per hour) plus unemployment and other taxes (another 7 cents per hour).
The Baxter, a general purpose robot, has a base price of $22,000.
Many single purpose robots are under $2,500 dollars now. The new hospital robots are $19,600. And the Kiva warehouse robots fully implemented cost $30k to $40k.
Robots never get involved in worker's compensation suits. It never takes vacation. It doesn't require healthcare. It never protests working conditions.
--- The challenge is that when humans can't exchange hours of their life for food and shelter- how are our societies going to justify giving them food and shelter?
Because if we don't- the French Revolution is going to look like a picnic.
If anyone is being ridiculous here, it's you.
A lot of work that requires smart people doesn't need an ounce of creativity. All that work- however complex- can be automated. And the payoffs for doing so are huge.
For a lot of other work that requires human creativity it has already been shown such work can be done by machines once the initial spark of creativity has created the new approach.
I withdraw "ridiculous". You're just being really really blind.