This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in 3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?
The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
91–100 of 141 posts
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Is it the chaotic environment? The temperature extremes? The unpredictability of each situation? All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue. Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.
I'm all for advances in technology making things safer and putting fewer people in harms way. I just don't think there is anything close to a 17% chance that it will happen in the next two decades. I say this as someone who has a foot in both worlds, so to speak... I work in technology, build UAV quadcopters (including playing with various sensors) as a hobbyist, and work at least one shift a week as a firefighter/pa…
It seems like you're stuck on the automaton aspect. Would not remote control robots decrease the number of firefighters necessary? If each building came equipped with remotely operated firefighting drones, response time would improve by orders of magnitude.
The same for car accident incidents: would a precisely controlled remote robot not be able to more aptly apply the jaws of life, especially in situations dangerous for a first responder?
Of course there are a bevy of situations where first responders are still absolutely necessary. But other things also work in tandem to improve the outcome: like civilian operated defibrillators. One could also interpret the 17% as "17% more effective, through automation, per person employed." This would, as a ratio of field employed to population, look less like jobs lost and more like additional jobs unnecessary.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#93I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ru…
Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.
This, I think, is basically the situation -- yet the end result looks a lot like the Evil Ruling Cabal Theory of Crap Jobs.
In general, the decision to automate, outsource/contract, or employ is made according to whether (at a very high level), the ability to and cost of automation and/or outsourcing a job (technically and in terms of market expectations); the price of labor; and the number of employees engaged in a company.
Eventually (skipping over the model and proof), what you end up with are, in general, tiny numbers of expensive, high-value employees whose skills are critical to the company, rare and hard to automate; large numbers of cheap, low-value employees whose jobs are too trivial to automate or send elsewhere; and a small number of employees in the middle, who carry out important, hard-to-automate tasks but whose skills are relatively easy to replace. Good jobs are scarce, crap jobs are plentiful, and the traditional middle and upper-middle classes will reasonably fear that they could be replaced at any point by fungible labor.
As we have seen across the world, such conditions create a political and social drive towards correction, though the nature of such corrections are themselves the result of parochial political prejudices (resulting in the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, "living wage" efforts, anti-immigration legislation, the invasion of Crimea, the Daily Express' circulation numbers, and so on).
Historically, such stagnation has also been corrected by the accessibility of new employment markets (physical frontiers, industrial and postindustrial revolutions or, more recently and on a very small and temporary scale, new petrochemical extraction methods), or the destruction and concomitant rebuilding of industry (such as the post-WW2 efforts in Europe). In the absence of either solution, it remains to be seen what will happen to our societies, but the histories of left- and right-wing revolutions are not encouraging.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
95% is crazy, but today there are lots of multi-millionaire CEOs who as a percentage of their income pay less taxes than their secretaries...
I see no problem with that, that looks perfectly legal. Democracy and legislation has decided that certain forms of income are to be taxed at a lower rate than others. And the CEO does lots of that "other" form of income, hence the lower rate. Why, what problem do you have with Democracy, err, I mean this tax-rate?
s/Democracy and legislation/vested interests and cronyism/
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like the technology forecasts in the 50ies and 60ies but with a pessimistic instead of an optimistic undertone.
In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas. Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
Some simpler financial news articles are now written by zero journalists. A program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't assume that the robotic solution will look anything like the human solution. A fitbit does not look like a "robotic personal trainer" and a roomba does not look like a person with a broom. I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into th…
I'm actually most of the way done with a prototype of a quadcopter that can be deployed on a scene that just orbits and streams video to a monitor in the chiefs vehicle. It's mostly off the shelf components, with a little bit of 'wrapper' that makes is easier to deploy. The biggest issue I haven't sorted out yet is the batteries... LiPo batteries are great in terms of capacity/weight, but if you keep them fully charg…
Could they be stored at a low temperature until there's an actual need to use the copter?
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#97They estimate in their chart that Athletic trainers have a 0.007 chance of being automated, the third lowest chance after therapists and dentists. it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that "unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone ap…
This shows me how myopic and out of touch these guys are - I already use the biggest loser on xbox kinect, and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me.
> and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me
In that case, the gym and trainer were not actually necessary in the first place. Below a specific level of fitness, it doesn't matter what exercise you do. There are safer and more efficient forms, but all that really matters is that you do it and you don't hurt yourself in the process. Those trainers, and gyms, were serving an artificial market that didn't actually need them (like some restaurant waiters, bank tellers, travel agents, etc).
Perhaps a better analysis of the whole situation is a collapse of existing artificial markets that businesses have used to expand beyond their current market.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#98"However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."
As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains". Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to computerization.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#99Of course, the other side of the coin says that there are too many people.
I think that this is a very important piece of the discussion. Improving the efficiency of a lot of workers and increasing automation does not marry up well with a constantly increasing world population.
The growth rate is falling though.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number of fires has indeed fallen dramatically. However, until the day when there is zero risk of there being a house fire (and we're a _long_ way from that), you still need to maintain a staffing level that can get the job done.
Last year, London announced plans to let go 10% of its firefighting force. This is despite booming population and construction. In 2004, there were 572,000 fires in the UK. In 2013, there were 193,000 reported fires. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... )
Sure, when you scale it up to the something the size of a city, then you can say "We want to be able to handle X major incidents at the same time over the entirety of the city."
My point is that X will continue to shrink (as has been the trend for decades), but never hit 0, and you can only consider a limited area before response times become an issue (even if you somehow got to the place where you were very confident there would never be more than one concurrent fire in the UK, obviously you couldn't reduce staffing to a single company).