Posted on 03/12/2014 1:57:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Mobile robots and "smart" computers are threatening to replace up to half the U.S. workforce within the next decade or two, according to a Bloomberg report.
The report cites an Oxford University study that identified more than 700 occupations at risk of computer automation.
Here are the jobs that are most at risk, based on the study.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
What free market?
Markets always exist. Some are more free than others.
Gee, Have not seen Max Headroom in years.
I have a feeling there will always be some place for young girls such as these HOOTER’S girls.
I can’t even get my coffee made right at a
Dunkin Donuts, I should feel confident that someone from India will detect a cancer in my films???
“... instructs me to “do the needful”. “
LOL, I looked that up, and incredibly, that was commonly heard, printed, and read in American English until the early 20th century. When you hear Indians speak, you are hearing early 20th century British English.
I won’t go to Hooters because they count beers and cut people off.
They are BEER teases, as well as...
{sigh} The word limit always seems to magically be right before the critical information. Are you sure this is an "excerpt" and not a "teaser?" Do you know or even care how annoying that is?
They missed one who has already become a “robot”.
Our “golfing robot” ODUMBO.
He is functioning like one with a few bad parts here and there. Time to junk him too.
I've been leaning toward a future of an automated, information driven world where the concept of market value and wealth no longer exists. By extension, skill, effort and intelligence cannot be applied to change your lot in life. Individuals will be born into their lot in life and not be able to change it.
It’s nice that somebody is giving some thought to these possibilities.
I doubt the society you posit will ever come about, at least in full. But I think it may be a great deal more difficult to rise, requiring greater skill, effort and intelligence than in the past.
Our economies and cultures have always been based on scarcity, that there is not enough stuff t go around. But what about there a society where there is a great deal of “stuff,” but very few people are needed to produce the stuff?
IOW, most people will be redundant to the economy. So in what sense will they have purpose or meaning?
RE: The word limit always seems to magically be right before the critical information. Are you sure this is an “excerpt” and not a “teaser?”
FR rules do not allow me to post the entire article (much less the interesting chart in that page ). I’ve been suspended for a week for doing just that.
The whole article is just a click away.
Did not know about getting suspended for that. Sorry, you must have gotten hold of the “Jerk Mod” (Was it a Saturday morning, by chance?). No warnings?
But often that “one click away” is a computer crash for a lot of people if the site you’re linking is full of Malware. You might not realize it because you have a good anti-malware program, but not everybody is situated that way. Some sites have a bad rep for that...like the pro-Obama Business Insider. Town Hall has gotten pretty bad, Washington Times is terrible with the pop-ups, pop-unders and such. They’re getting better at their anti ad-blocking techniques.
What I’ve seen some people do is summarize the points without direct quoting. A list of the 12 jobs, for example, would have been good.
You have identified the problem, along with a large number of others, numerically. Percentage-wise, most are unable to get beyond 'American Idol' and this is at least two steps further along. I know what worked previously, and still works in other countries, and that is servants, indentured servants, and apprentices. Most Americans have been brain-washed to believe menial jobs are beneath them and all should get a college education, when in fact, almost all people find satisfaction in doing a good job, whatever it is. I despise socialists who ignore this to further their own cause.
Abolish welfare and all social programs in accordance with our Constitution and let charity work as intended. We will have our culture back and no need for Big Government.
I find it hard to believe that paralegals and legal assistants are going to be replaced by robots, as this article says.You'd better believe it. Right now I'm working on a suite of legal documentation and research programs that my company will be marketing to BigLaw firms, to be trickled down to the smaller ones. 90% of what a paralegal writes and researches? Automated. We're already receiving blowback from some paralegals who have seen what we're working on. They know it's going to put them out of a job. Fixed costs versus increasing salary/benefits and all that.
If they can replace Loan Officers, then couldn’t they replace most government employees with robots?You betcha. Public employees are going to be running scared.
While technology has its uses I have never understood the drive to eliminate people from the workforce.Money. Humans are increasing costs in the workforce. Salary increases, COL increases, taxes, benefits, sick days, so on. Machines are fixed costs. You pay a fixed cost to install, a fixed cost to maintain. Makes for better balance sheets.
Learn to make and program Robots I guess... until the Robots learn to make and program other Robots...Already done. Not widespread, but the basics have been figured.
I install and support automation. Trust me when I tell you that there is no job loss ratio. It just shifts labor from the grunt pool to the clever grunt pool.So do I and I have to completely disagree. Let me install one of my company's Total Document Systems in an office. You can fire all of the secretaries and 90% of the office workers. The remaining 10% don't even need to be clever, they can just be trained monkeys if need be. And productivity will INCREASE.
Unfortunately, the majority of the human race just isn’t smart enough to function effectively in a high-tech environment.That's the sad truth.
Increasingly in recent decades, muscle power is irrelevant. More and more intelligence is needed for the jobs that are truly in demand....The other issue is that fewer and fewer people are needed in raw numbers.Man, you are preaching it. Dead straight on. This is absolutely correct.
@Resolute Conservative: What are all these displaced people going to do?
@Sherman Logan: More and more of our population is going to be falling out the bottom of the job market. There will simply be no economic demand for anything they are capable of doing or of learning to do. What are these people going to do with their lives?...What is everybody else going to do?...IOW, most people will be redundant to the economy. So in what sense will they have purpose or meaning?There are three realistic possibilities: 1) Expansion 2) War 3) Welfare, probably a minimum guaranteed income Without being able to eliminate scarcity completely, #3 is simply not feasible. So you are left with #1 and #2. I personally and morally disagree with the use of pointless wars to reduce surplus population, so that leaves #1. But this means we have to have a NATIONAL effort at expansion, even if we don't have a point or reason to expand. Not that one is necessary; we can always make up reasons why we need to colonize the ocean floor or space or whereever. Heck, the Cold War was predicated on reasons like that. But it's going to require national effort and as much as I hate it, there'll probably have to be some government incentive applied.
Expand to do what? If we control more territory, how does that create more jobs? It will still be cheaper and more efficient to use robots to exploit the new areas.
I think you discount welfare too easily. In the world I see coming, “stuff” will be very cheap and thus readily available. Most people won’t have a job, but will be supported by the system without contributing to it. There will probably be enough wealth around that this will not be a strain for society. Quite possibly at a material standard of living for the lowest equal to or higher than the median for today.
The problems are (at least) three-fold:
1. Won’t be a problem for liberals, but conservatism based on the free market goes out the window. A market is by definition a way of determining the most efficient allocation of scarce resources. It quite literally has no purpose in a context where there is little scarcity.
2. It seems most likely that distribution of resources in such a society will be largely handled by the government, a sort of super welfare state. I think that’s a bad idea, and I assume there are alternative mechanisms, but I don’t have a clue how they might work.
3. What will most people do with themselves? The record of Indian reservations, ghettoes and English welfare slums does not indicate a rosy future for those for whom society has no need. Material standard of living quite aside, what will give these people purpose? Sex, drugs and entertainment?
She's never going back to working for those debt churning nuthouses.
Expand to do what? If we control more territory, how does that create more jobs?Reserve the robots for the homeland and make the colonies work off muscle power. Creates jobs for the otherwise useless. Better than giving them a rifle and making them charge machine guns.
I think you discount welfare too easily.I discount it because the very idea of welfare is socialism. It shouldn't exist.
Most people won’t have a job, but will be supported by the system without contributing to it. There will probably be enough wealth around that this will not be a strain for society.That would be Communism and producer slavery. The producers should go Galt if it's going to be like that.
Material standard of living quite aside, what will give these people purpose?This is why religion needs to be promoted again. Belief in God gives you a godly purpose.
My point was that socialism and capitalism both assume scarcity. They are ways of determining who gets what when there isn’t enough to go around.
I suspect that in the future “stuff” will be free or cheap enough that it is almost free.
In such an environment how are socialism and capitalism even relevant?
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