51–60 of 64 posts
Sorry, i get these random thoughts in my head sometimes! :P
[1] http://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictu...
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There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcam…
Yes, there are undiscovered future uses for labor and the capital/labor imbalance could be alleviated (or exacerbated) by discovering them. It is still utterly absurd to bind the wellbeing of our society to a gamble on the rate of discovery and the extent of these untapped resources.
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> just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? In…
> When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well. The service industry is not going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Many jobs wont even be replaced because robots wont be economical enough to do so (hairdressers robots anyone?). And the more you have robots out there, the more you will need maintenance people, industries to manufacture robots…
Funny, the use of iPads instead of servers at many fast food restaurants was one of the examples I was considering using. Hair dresser robots for many people aren't that far out.
> we have not discovered a way to do super smart robots than can design themselves just yet.
Key word there: yet. What do we do when that yet comes to pass?
> the job market is dynamic
Do you believe the job market will continue to provide jobs when it's not profitable to? When a company has to make the choice between a machine and a human, why would it ever go with the human, when the net cost of the machine is lower than that of the human? One machine can replace a minimum of three people (working 24 hours on a job your average worker does 8 hours on), and it won't take three people per machine to maintain them.
Of course, the human could always offer their services at a cost below that of the robot - but I don't believe that is sustainable for the human. As an example, for me to be more economical than a computer for my employeer, I would have to methodically classify over 2,500 tweets to earn a single dollar. And since my employer wants these classifications done in near real time, they'd have to employ most of the town I live in, just to do this one mostly-clerical task.
"Will robots cause unemployment or... increased leisure time for humans?" These aren't mutually exclusive.
> But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex it couldn’t be automated only to see it turned on its head by Google and others. What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learnin…
In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.)
I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.
Always coming back to this silliness: > They all float the idea of basic guaranteed incomes for everyone, or tax credits to supplement low-wage workers. Yeah, just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach. It's so disappointing to see otherwise smart people ending up with these kind of conclusions.
> just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? In…
To support your point, if we suffer a similar disruption in employment where the largest occupations start an irreversible downward trend, what sector is going to take up this burden? If you look at the statistics for the current largest employers[2] you'll see a list of jobs where automation has already made significant inroads. To name the three largest:
* Retail salesperson
* Cashiers
* Food preparation and service workers
I doubt that the other large employers on the list could absorb these workers. We just don't have that other large employer to take up the slack as when manufacturing absorbed and made use of former farm labourers. We also don't have the frontier of a new world to provide a second start for families seeking a better future. We've managed to paint ourselves into a corner with our current system and we can either sit here and suffer or bite the bullet and start over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots
[2] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_chart...
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> just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? In…
> When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well. The service industry is not going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Many jobs wont even be replaced because robots wont be economical enough to do so (hairdressers robots anyone?). And the more you have robots out there, the more you will need maintenance people, industries to manufacture robots…
This argument is often made, but the fact is that the amount of jobs created by robot manufacturing and maintenance will always be smaller than the amount of jobs replaced by robots... after all, if this weren't the case, robots wouldn't be used in the first place because they wouldn't be profitable!
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We have a similar idea to those communes already, they are called "businesses".
Does the business you work for produce the goods and services you consume, or at least the goods and services you need to survive? Does the business you work for have a recipe for turning unskilled labor into the goods & services required for those people to lead a similarly comfortable life? If so, that's good news, because it means that your business is in a position to alleviate the economic nightmare scenario we…
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Does the business you work for produce the goods and services you consume, or at least the goods and services you need to survive? Does the business you work for have a recipe for turning unskilled labor into the goods & services required for those people to lead a similarly comfortable life? If so, that's good news, because it means that your business is in a position to alleviate the economic nightmare scenario we…
Once you've re-run history, you'll discover trade.
The point isn't to eliminate trade, markets, capitalism, or even jobs. Just the opposite, I would imagine. The point is that a hypothetical "extremistan" future in which most people struggle to eek out a living presents a business opportunity which has historically failed to take off due to the limits of manufacturing technology. If someone can make this business opportunity work, it will act as a relief valve to alleviate extreme poverty.
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Yes, there are undiscovered future uses for labor and the capital/labor imbalance could be alleviated (or exacerbated) by discovering them. It is still utterly absurd to bind the wellbeing of our society to a gamble on the rate of discovery and the extent of these untapped resources.
My point was more we should look to re-allocate resources, financial and human, to discovery producing activities in the future, i.e. R&D, thus employing, educating, and empowering people, regardless of the actual rate of discovery per person/dollar invested in R&D.
