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I have done robotics installs for about 6 years now
There are simply too many people and too few jobs. Robots will work alongside people and ultimately produce better products. Then they begin to displace the people.
The legal profession was already significantly disrupted by legalzoom
Tax/audit will be one of the next areas - anything repetitive can be automated
Anything driven, from cars and trucks to forklifts and freight ships will be impacted.
You will order and pay on machines at your table in restaurants. More food will be made through timed conveyors eliminating jobs, it will accelerate if wages rise.
You already check into your hotels with your phone, self check-in kiosks and keyless doors will significantly impact the hotel industry
This isn't happening in 20 or 30 years, it's happening now
I welcome this new future and look forward to it. I support universal basic income and am hopeful of the new knowledge industries that will develop. It is ridiculous to me that some people spend their entire working lives doing tasks that can be replaced by robots, I personally would rather have people spending that time on recreational activities than be janitors/waiters/etc. their entire lives.
Study some basic economics @c1. The top 1% are here to make money. They only automate when it's profitable. If it destroys the market it's not profitable. Honestly, the economic illiteracy in this thread is far more frightening than increased automation.
It is morally right, from an evolutionary perspective. Those who can't adapt will make humanity weaker in the long run. You might consider this line of reasoning mean, but it is what has happened and will happen as part of our species' evolution.
I'm not even worried about machines enslaving humans but about a few Jumana controlling all machines (ie the economy) while the rest get leftovers or bare minimum to survive...
There will be fewer jobs though. That will be the challenge. With this, The wage gap will continue to grow.
Who is to say you can't automate innovation? - some research and studies will see increased automation that can increase speed to market. Look at how much faster and cheaper a genome can be mapped. It is already beginning in the pharmaceutical industry.
Watson just co-wrote a song. Using patterns it can predict what might sound best in conjunction with humans.
Think of education - self paced and remote instruction is already a reality. If tax income is hammered couldn't schools supplement with remote and automated instruction.
Teachers could legitimately begin to be automated in many capacities and the need reduced.
Cashless society and registered devices, will even put many kinds of crime, nearly out of business.
Combine this with self driving cars that will eliminate traffic and parking tickets, so municipalities will need far fewer police.
Smart homes could radically reduce fires - meaning far fewer fireman.
These are major employers and without these jobs and tax revenues to fund pensions, how many municipalities and cities will have budget crises?
The decision trees and game theory analysis and simulation style projects could really heat up
@D2, you can stuff it. There's no market if the top 1% who control businesses run out of people to sell to because they can't afford their products. The economy becomes based on B2B deals, high net worth individuals, and squeezing the most out of those at the bottom.
And @PWC1, you can vote. You can be politically active. We don't make nearly enough time for educating ourselves on public administration and decisions of our elected officials. I hope this election has taught us at least that.
@op, my recollection of warnings from those individuals were more Terminator Rise of the Machines than labor market focused. People have been scared of automation and predicting the end of labor since the candlemakers picketed lightbulbs and the horse and carriage union fought against Ford. iphones put Kodak out of business and created an entire app platform with hundreds of millions of users to innovate from, never mind the infintisemal increase in human productivity that resulted from having the sum total of human knowledge available at your fingertips on a mountaintop. I'm an economist and I don't care what Fox says or half the pop culture op-eds published say to sell periodicals and clicks. Yes, most of the manu jobs lost to China and Mexico are gone and not coming back, and many of those people were permanently injured for societies benefit, but the concerns about permanent job shortfalls are completely absurd. There's a higher percentage of the population employed than there was in the 70's, even while baby boomers exit the labor force en masse. You said you wanted to have a conversation but instead you just make ridiculous claims without a basic grasp for how the economy functions. Try econ 101 again
Thanks for the reads @op. I've read the Hawking one before. He predicts inequality will increase, not that people will be unemployed. I agree that's possible, but don't care as long as everyone is better off. Gates just says the labor market will change and menial jobs will disappear. He also advocates for less govt involvement in the labor market, including ending increases to minimum wage. I completely agree with Gates, and again, this doesn't support your theory of permanent joblessness. Finally, Musk incorrectly makes the same prediction early twentieth century economists made, that people will no longer beed to work and will preoccupy themselves with leisure. They were wrong and I think Musk is too. Two of the three links you posted do nothing to support your position and in fact advocate for policies different from yours. The economic illiteracy is one problem that seems compounded by poor reading comprehension. I'm genuinely concerned that someone with your lack of your own ignorance speaks with such confidence and authority
New jobs always emerge. Always.
Heck no. I love to consume the benefits of automation. And most of the people I know (essentially all my friends, and more than half of my family) have been net winners from it. But in society (or in my family), there's that other 30% or so that have been net losers. Ignoring the losers is neither morally right, nor even in the interests of the rest of us in the long term, because when they get upset enough, they go and do something destructive like riot and destroy property, or vote for Brexit, or vote for Trump.
Plot twist: what if we, as consultants, have our jobs automated?
There are plenty of repetitive tasks we do every day... research, excel, making decks
I read something interesting the other day. OP I agree with pretty much everything you said. But, one thing that gives me hope: I was reading an article about how automation of metallurgy was feared to drive out the blacksmith profession. And he did, but he gave rise to a ton of new manufacturing jobs and industries that people could have never anticipated without automated metallurgy. So, we don't know what automation across all these other industries will bring, but we can hope that it will bring new industries we can't imagine today. In general, the average quality of life for human on this planet can only go up as we continue to automate
Has anyone read this article? It's interesting and talks about the extinction of humans by AI to do a mundane task. Point is once AI surpasses human intelligence we are screwed. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Most telling statement of economic ignorance, "everything you learned... doesn't work in the real world... Those execs only care about one thing:increasing profit." The profit motive and the price mechanism are the foundations of microeconomics that you clearly missed. Have a discussion, be interested, just don't make ridiculous assertions to promote your foolish political agenda.
I don't know what the role of government should be or will need to be, or how technological change will impact society.
There are always winners and losers but the government historically has shown itself to lack foresight and agility. For instance, there needs to be pension reform and social security reform given the changes to life expectancy and societal/economic changes.
Governments are entrenched though which is a main contributor to why we see budget overruns and these futile challenges to innovations like Uber or AirB&B.
There will be no robot overlords, but if there are overlords, the robots will serve them, not necessarily "us". In an authoritarian state, they would be made to serve the head of state, and the state would become more powerful and harder to resist or overthrow. In a market-based society, they would serve whoever owns them, and tend to drive inequality up. While in a market society, these changes at the margin wouldn't happen unless somebody stood to profit, it's naive to assume that everyone would. If we want to ensure that all of this automation serves everyone, instead of just consolidating power, then we need to take some sort of action that plausibly could lead to that outcome, which doesn't include wishing, or asserting that it'll all take care of itself if we just ignore it. Universal basic income is one idea which seems to have promise. I'd be open to others, but haven't heard a better one yet.
I agree that new jobs will emerge. But people looking for new jobs after their old one was replaced by robots are in general not going to find great options, unless they learn some new skills. And learning a new skill that's really valuable typically takes time - time that often isn't paid. So especially for people that already have families to support, the dilemma is real - take an unskilled job to keep the cash coming in, even though you know it will keep getting worse, or try to get a loan to invest in a degree or other training program. In a lot of cases that second option isn't even available, or it turns out to be a mirage because the degree doesn't actually provide the opportunities promised. This is the reality lots of people are already living in and further automation will keep exacerbating it.
Also, sure we might need more PhD's to program and run these machines but what does the two thirds of the population without a college degree do?
Fantastic thread everyone. I would love to explore some potential jobs resulting from automation as c3 mentioned.