Obviously, we should put them on the B Ark and send them to another planet.
Trimming the 10% at the top and the bottom on a yearly basis would provide a better outcome according to game theory.
You described US Education system.
The rise of the useless class
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: The rise of the useless class
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. Did the number of cashier's per customer (or perhaps more significantly, as a share of the population -- not labor force) increase? If you look at even AEIs graph [0] that they use to try to sell idea that ATMs didn't kill cashiers' jobs, it shows cashiers increasing r…
Why is your proposed metric better than the original? Honest question.
Because difficulty of finding a job is related to jobs per unit population (absolute numbers aren't important, and labor force is the wrong comparison because jobs becoming scarce causes people to exit the labor force, which includes only those working or actively looking for work, which people stop doing when actively looking for work doesn't pay off.)
Re: The rise of the useless class
#23I'm sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign 'probabilities of automation.' I don't have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things: 1. Automation doesn't imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased. 2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will…
>3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc) Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When…
> supermarket cashiers
Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers).
[1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
Re: The rise of the useless class
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
>3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc) Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When…
> supermarket cashiers Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers). [1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
I don't, did you reply to the wrong comment? I explicitly said that's not the useless class right now.
Re: The rise of the useless class
#25Meh... the new in-demand job for "useless" people will be gathering all the training data to feed into TensorFlow.
Re: The rise of the useless class
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is your proposed metric better than the original? Honest question.
Not the parent, but all other things remaining the same, population growth alone will drive the need for more cashiers. Since ATMs did not stop population growth, percentage based metrics help account for that. So the different types of numbers can help drive home different points: * in absolute numbers, ATMs didn't cause any job losses. * in relative numbers, there are less job opportunities in this space. (e.g. the…
There's also the factory vs car improvement difference. Factories did not make workers obsolete; cars did make horses obsolete. I'm not sure we can ahead of time tell whether particular technological improvements are more like factories or cars.
Re: The rise of the useless class
#27Arguably, some of this is already happening. IMO there was a much better article a few months ago - https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/
Re: The rise of the useless class
#28I want to be like my dog, but smarter and with more freedom. Every day I look at the lazy beast and wonder at the simplicity of its existence. Give me that life and an allowance for supplies to create, eat, socialize, and travel and let me loose.
This is the missing component of the Drake equation.
The probability of any given sentient species eventually developing AI that is sophisticated enough that they cease all outward exploration and turn into a galactic shut-ins. Completely content to while away the millennia playing Candy Crush VR while the automatons take care of their birth/feeding/death cycle...
Re: The rise of the useless class
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>3. 'useless' class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren't necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are 'useless' by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc) Actually, those jobs are still there. The current useless class are the people who are not capable of holding a modern job. And they're not receiving the support from the society that they should. When…
> supermarket cashiers Why do you think they're useless? They certainly aren't currently [1]. Someone has to do their work, either paid employees or unpaid volunteers (i.e. customers). [1] at least until that Amazon fantasy-land store becomes a practical reality, if it ever does
Half the cashier's job is automated (tallying is managed by scanning in the items, payment is handled by using the customer facing CC machine; they only handle cash, checks, and manual entry of produce). Bagging is often handled by cashiers, customers, or dedicated baggers. Baggers are cheap, the only skill required is to know not to put eggs beneath a half-gallon of milk (though many seem not to know this anymore). Cashiers cost more because you have to trust them.
Handling cash can be handled by automatic machines (as evidenced by the many self-checkout systems) with one person dedicated to 4-8 checkout stations to assist with issues, check customer IDs, etc.
It's not that they're useless, but cashiers' utility is greatly diminished these days with automation reducing the skill, trust, and number of personnel required.
Re: The rise of the useless class
#30I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don't really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence. What we do have is a suite of sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using huge data sets. This often approximates some subset of what a general artifical intelligence could do for some use cases that mostly apply to recognizing fuzzy patterns. But it's not even close to approaching human-level intelligence.
In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the "pattern recognition" aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.)
I don't doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness/dignity, but I question the timeline of "decades away".