Will the 2nd Great Machine Age be a frightening jobless dystopia?

The London Telegraph ^ | January 25, 2014 | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

[2ndDivisionVet]

Thanks to lightning-speed advances in hi-tech, humanity (or part of it) is close to achieving its dream of prosperity without toil. We are already starting glimpse the awful consequences. As Voltaire said, work is the triple tonic for needs, vice, and boredom.

A Davos vote split 51:49 on whether "technological innovation" will keep displacing jobs – and at an accelerating rate – leaving us with a deformed world where hundreds of millions are left on the unemployment scrap-heap (205m so far).

The waters have been so muddied by the global financial crisis – and the 1930s response to it in some quarters – that it is hard to separate the chronic job wastage caused by "robots" (to use a metaphor) from the temporary effects of scarce global demand.

Phillip Jennings, head of the UNI global labour federation, said it would be a "miscarriage of justice" to blame the 32 million job losses since the Lehman-EMU crisis on the iPad or the driverless car.

"You can't put technology in the dock for 50pc youth unemployment in Greece or Spain. I blame the EU Troika. It was the economic and political decisions taken that have led to the collapse of jobs. In Greece it has gone beyond depression into a humanitarian crisis," he said at the World Economic Forum....

[tbw2]

People won’t permit automation if it means they starve. Nor will they permit power for automation while others freeze.

And there are many jobs robots won’t be doing.
The Great Shift Toward Automation and the Future of Employment
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment

[tbw2]

Skilled labor, what we used to call blue collar jobs, can’t be done by robots and are in great demand. Too many people tried to get into college and knowledge work without the capacity and now work in sales or sit at home.
We should be training kids to be plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics, carpenters, CNC programmers, computer hardware technicians, QC techs.

[Sawdring]

Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels covered this many years ago. Earth outlaws robots because of the effect they were having on humanity. The outer planets didn’t and he goes into detail about what happened to the people on some of the planets.

[Chode]

A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.

[Ozark Tom]

Commercial or military electronic equipment is designed modular for maintenance, but a majority of consumer electronics is based on sufficient service life until replacement. Well considered modules allow upgrade to overall performance with only a swap. But lock-in to a long term service and support contract often results in using antiquated equipment way past its prime.

A good example of this modular philosophy carried over into consumer goods is the desktop computer. But just as the previously common local repair shop for televisions have faded, such is the fate of computers.

What has not been considered yet is a disrupting technology allowing custom fabrication with best methods for one-off equipment, without the penalties currently embodied in a design-tooling-fabrication cycle. Aerospace innovators have already embraced 3d-cad-fab techniques.

[CowboyJay]

"What has not been considered yet is a disrupting technology allowing custom fabrication with best methods for one-off equipment, without the penalties currently embodied in a design-tooling-fabrication cycle. Aerospace innovators have already embraced 3d-cad-fab techniques."

I fully expect 3D printing to surpass CNC milling sometime in the next decade. So do most engineers I talk with. That's part of the reason companies are having trouble finding machinists. It's a dead-end trade, and the schooling may be less than a 4-yr degree, but it's still pricey.