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.
All salient points and nobody wants to talk about these. Make no mistake I am firmly a capitalist, but when you broach these subjects other conservatives immediately want to attack your credentials. My question is always, “okay you tell me how this works when 70% of your population is incapable of doing high tech and they need jobs and those jobs are gone?” They always want to say the patent answer, “businesses are in business to make money and not make jobs.” In principle I agree, but that does not rectify the impending crisis that you have listed, 1)war, 2)expansion, 3)welfare. I will say that #2 is a limited parameter so that leaves #1 and #3. How far can we expand? This has always been my argument (for which I get heavily chastised for) that globalization is a false premise. The drive to globalize is one of the driving forces for efforts to increase automation so you can turn out more cheap product, not make quality products.
We are in a pickle and the ones that understand it fall in two categories: 1) they are making lots of money and have all the power and do not want to change and 2) have no power and are this dismissed when they try and talk about it.