Posted on 07/20/2015 4:57:12 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
New technologies fascinate us – from the precision of robotic surgery to the potential of Amazon dropping packages on our doorsteps via drone. But at the same time, there is anxiety over robots and artificial intelligence making human labor unnecessary and, ultimately, replacing us.
Fear of the changes innovation brings is nothing new, and the reality is that robots will eventually replace us in many or most of today’s jobs and that’s, in fact, a glorious thing.
Yes, jobs will be destroyed by innovation, as they’ve always been, but it doesn’t mean we’ll run out of jobs. New ones will be created as new technologies are developed, engineered and maintained. And, overall, these will be better, more high-skilled jobs. The agriculture industry provides a case in point.
Farming used to employ plenty of manual labor to do very physical work. But today, technological innovation – from basic tractors to complex irrigation systems – has not only eliminated backbreaking tasks but has also created new, more-skilled jobs. In fact, there are so many jobs in agriculture due to the increasing intricacy of the industry that approximately 60,000 positions remain vacant. Much of the work has moved out of the fields and into labs, where microbiologists, meteorologists and veterinarians all play an important role in getting safe foods to tables across the country. And these jobs requiring higher skills also pay higher salaries.
When manual and repetitive tasks are automated through the use of machines and technology, low-skilled work becomes safer – dangerous and harmful tasks are better done by machines. Those who, 100 years ago, would have toiled in the fields have safer, better-paying jobs in factories, offices and universities today. Surely, this is progress we should welcome.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
This is all very well, but half of the human race is below average in intelligence. What are they going to do?
Same thing they’ve always done.
Become teachers, politicians, and reporters.
“What are they going to do?”
Become Senators and Representatives.
The robots taking jobs thing is wildly overblown as is the high level of training “required” to work on them.
I’m a high school drop out and I learned to program and maintain a bank of robotic painters as well as running the rest of the paint room. A Fanuc rep would come in for software upgrades but they were under contract to do that anyway.
Join the 47 percenters and go on government assistance.
Robots will make minorities obsolete. Then what happens?
Yeah. And who will pay to support the low-IQ individuals who will no longer be working? Oh, I forgot, we will, as usual.
Nailhead, meet hammer.
For thousands of years, much human work could be done just about as well by someone of well below average intelligence. Doesn’t take a particularly high IQ to be a galley slave or serf. In fact, intelligence was quite likely a hindrance to survival, as you’d probably more likely to “get above yourself” and be killed by someone above you in the social hierarchy. See the Jim Crow South.
The Industrial Revolution increasingly removed the demand for human muscle power, to the point where in advanced countries it is very nearly gone. As are the jobs that require only it.
The Cybernetic Revolution is in the process of doing the same. An IQ point falls out of the effective demand job market every year or two now.
New (and better) jobs are created, but most of those displaced are simply not intelligent enough to be retrained to perform them.
The world of the future will be immensely productive, which means that huge amounts of “stuff” will be produced with very low and decreasing human effort. Which means, by definition, more and more people will simply be redundant to the economy other than as consumers.
As its last great act of creative destruction the free market will destroy itself. It is by definition a mechanism for efficiently distributing scarce resource. When resources are no longer scarce, the market will disappear, at least over large areas of life.
I have no clue what will replace the market economy, but I worry it will be the all-powerful state.
Pass legislation to improve the intelligence of the lower half.
Pass legislation to improve the intelligence of the lower half.
Fixed.
Due to our stupid policy of off shoring, robotics really won't affect the USA very much. We are becoming a post industrial nation with a high unemployed part of the populace, which is structural in nature.
More technology will lead to even more herding of the majority of people, the non-innovaters.
I'd be happier in a world that recognized and appreciated the positive aspects of those days.
High school dropout is not necessarily correlated with low IQ.
The problem with retraining people is not their level of formal education, it’s their level of intelligence.
Education can be acquired. Intelligence cannot be. It is quite probably largely fixed at birth, and is certainly fixed by the time one becomes an adult.
The problem with a lot of the jobs which are currently being replaced is that creative types got swept up into them because the jobs that required creativity (or could even abide it) were few. I’m not sure how we get from point A to point B exactly, but I’ve seen a need and start college in a month to shake loose the cobwebs and learn something new. Pretty sure I’ll be hanging out my own shingle, so I can’t train for what I’d be best at even now, but it will still be a LOT more fun than what I had been doing!
I have a friend a couple doors down who stuck with the same sort of thing I had been doing, and she is currently being squeezed out, which is no fun at all.
I was at a large printing facility last week.
The floor covered at minimum several acres. Hundreds of machines humming away. Almost no people on the floor. Even the fork lifts were automated.
Happy talk articles like this one ignore many things. But one of the main things they ignore is numbers.
Sure, the facility I was at required workers to operate and maintain the robotic equipment. These are no doubt good jobs, much better than the machine operator jobs they replaced.
But it’s probable no more than 10, at most, of these jobs are provided for every 100 workers no longer needed. This is especially true because this plant operates 24/7. It therefore probably replaced three or four plants, and their workers, of equivalent size from just a couple of decades ago.
Taking jobs nobody else will do? I’ve heard this somewhere before.
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