and i hope the whiny azz, gimmie $15 an hour to spit in your fast food makers are the first to go...
Posted on 09/29/2013 7:01:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The authors of this study - two academics from Oxford - aren't saying that we will definitely lose 47% of current jobs to automation. They are saying its possible as artificial intelligence - AI - becomes reality.
From Slate:
In "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?," Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are "at risk" of being automated in the next 20 years. This does not mean that they necessarily will be automated (despite the way the study has been portrayed in some media outlets)--rather, the authors argue, it is plausible over the next two decades that existing and foreseeable AI technologies could be used to cost-effectively automate those jobs out of existence. Machines may not (and probably won't) do the jobs the same way as people, however--just remember the last time you used an automated check-out system at a grocery store. There's a difference between machines doing something cheaply and doing it well. Frey and Osborne took into account the possibility of such "task simplification" in their analysis.
Which jobs are most at risk? According to The Jetsons, we should expect robots to clean our houses and do other working-class occupations that educated elites have historically looked down upon as "unskilled." But anyone who has done such a job, or has watched an episode of Undercover Boss and seen highly-paid CEOs fumble while trying to carry out the demanding minimum wage jobs usually performed by their underlings, knows that there is no such thing as unskilled labor anymore (if there ever was), especially if you are comparing humans and machines in the same breath. The gap between humans and current AI is vastly greater than the differences between humans.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I read the article. Not much content there. :(
Bring back US jobs now.
and i hope the whiny azz, gimmie $15 an hour to spit in your fast food makers are the first to go...
I often use the automated check-out in stores. They’re great. But the automated check-out machines, while great, need a employee to hover around helping people with machines that malfunction or aid customers who don’t know how to operate them. Every time a new machine or technology is created, humans are needed to build and maintain those machines. So some jobs are lost through machines, but others are created. It’s called creative destruction after economist Joseph Schumpeter.
Well, according to king hussein we’ve already gotten rid of bank tellers and travel agents due to their jobs being “robotized”. Huh? What an idiot. And, don’t forget. GWB was the stupid one.
Much of my job as an engineer was boringly repetitive. I thought of ways to automate it using the existing software. Assembling data, reports etc. became easier and easier. If the company I worked for had made a purposeful effort the work load across the board would have dropped 30% with just a one time cost for programs inside platforms like Excel, which can look in a half dozen different databases and assemble a report and draw charts. It would take only a quick check and edit. But the company would rather bill every possible hour. I was told, “Are you crazy? Our profit is a percentage of costs. Besides, do you want to lose your job?”
Incidentally, they’ve laid off half of their workforce to date and will lay off half of the remainder sometime after Q1 next year. That’s about 7,000 people total.
Does that mean that New York can get rid of all those Muslim cab drivers then and ship them back to sh!tholeistan?
First, a large unskilled population is not an asset but a liability. To those conservatives and liberals who want to flood the country with unskilled immigrants in order to prop up Social Security, consider that these people will not contribute but will subtract from the gross domestic product.
Second, Ponzi schemes such as Social Security which depend on an ever-increasing base of wage earners for the pyramid to continue are in for real trouble if lower-class workers are replaced with machines.
Third, if humans can be replaced by computers in the private and domestic sphere they can be replaced at a wholesale level among the military forces. Increasingly large populations will not be the foundation upon which mighty defense forces are erected. Strong economies will remain indispensable to strong defense but those economies will be digital economies. Conservatives believe that we have to increase the population to stay strong are only courting weakness. In the future large population centers will not be so much an asset but targets.
Fourth, to the degree that we parcel out healthcare in this country based on employment status, that will have to be changed. I am not suggesting a single-payer system but I am suggesting that employers will look at computerizing their jobs because computers don't get sick and they don't get sick leave, pregnancy leave, or require ever-increasing medical insurance payments. Moreover, the government is much less inclined to regulate business to protect machines.
Fifth, income taxes are at least partially Texas on wages but wages might be decreasingly how wealth is accumulated in the future as machines take over more and more of production. The challenge for conservatives will be to find a way to fund the government by taxing the output of machines without introducing socialism, without confiscating property and without creating disincentives to computerize and produce.
Sixth, education will have to be radically reformed in order to create a workforce which can create and program the machines used to produce widgets and provide services. Much like our Social Security system and our healthcare system which are based on wage earning, our educational system used to be based on wage earning and now is based on social engineering. Both models will have to be abandoned and education will have to be demonstrably related to producing talent which is usable. This is primarily a political problem.
Seventh, as the world becomes increasingly technological a higher and higher percentage of the population will reveal themselves to be incapable of contributing. They will prove an increasing drag on the economy and they will be exploited by demagogues who will attempt to prohibit businesses from hiring only people with talent enough to contribute. Race will be invoked. Somehow this must be solved.
We should start with the collection, editing and dissemination of news.
Think how different the news would be without the subjectivity of humans, specifically liberal /progressive humans.
Most people are robots anyway so this shouldn’t matter much.
They need to come up with the AI part before they can do the robotics..
But with just that AI part, they could do:
47% of the lawyers
47% of the doctors
47% of the Senators
and, of course,
90% of the smart-asses...
;-)
Prolly should read 15% of the smart-asses, because most of the ones I know are way, way, way smarter than doctors or lawyers or Senators!!
Nothing new. What is that statistic? A hundred years ago 90% of Americans raised food, now, 1%? That’s a lot of automation. One major occupation a hundred years ago was “calculator”. That of course is gone. Typesetters, typists, proofreaders, draftsmen, elevator operators, traffic control cops (in some countries signal lights are called “robots”), etc.
I’m expecting to see fast food jump into automation very soon. The local “Wawa” stores have kiosks for customers to make orders at the deli counter — even things like rolls. There is no human contact. The next step is replacing the sandwich assemblers with “Baxter”. It will happen fast, and there will be “labor” issues — lots of strikes and riots.
Soon the carbon based interface units will be declared redundant — and will have to be deactivated.
I expect one of these days I may well actually hear "This is the voice of World Control."
I flat out refuse to use the auto-teller, as there is no discount for using it.
Charge less for using it, I’ll consider it, but why should I pay the same price to do a job that is included in the price of my goods?
Then there is the human interaction of chatting with the cashier, and the folks in line.
The same issues were touched upon in other sci-fi classics such as Orwell's “1984” and Huxley's “Brave New World”.Orwell culled the world through constant wars between superpowers and an all powerful police state. Huxley relied on eugenics: test tube breeding and stunting of intellect so that the lower classes would be content with their limited existences.
To date, no one seems to have thought about the three choices or paths humanity must face: 1) say that we have invented all there is to invent and know all there is to know [freeze all development and progress]; 2) junk technology and go back to a more primitive time [the Luddite ideal]; 3) pursue technology full throttle and accept the costs on society this technology brings for good or ill.
In the first instance, freezing development, humans are driven to find better ways and invent new things. This enforced stagnation cannot work for any length of time.
In the second case, the Luddite society, people are too attached to the ease that technology has brought them. Even the Greenies don't want to give up their electric lights, smart phones, iPads, grocery stores, central air and heating, running water, and indoor plumbing. Very few of them would relish living in a cave, wearing animal skins, hunting and gathering, fighting off other tribes, and thinking of 40 years old as “ancient”.
No, the third option is what humanity has embraced — technology — and we cannot go back to either of the first two scenarios. However, technology is a two edged sword. The more technological your society becomes, the less able it is to cope when the technology breaks. A simple example: a tornado devastates an area and wipes out the phone lines and electric lines. People are then forced into living in the 19th century; they'll do anything to get communications and power back to “normal”.
The nature of society and its jobs must change due to the impact of increasing technology.
So far, our current system is NOT able to make this basic transition.
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