Posted on 07/12/2016 5:11:29 AM PDT by expat_panama
As new technologies have always done
Except when our betters at google 'disappear' search results that don't fit The Agenda, and we trust the searches to be accurate.
I suppose that happens and you are free to go to the library to look stuff up free of Google bias. But I'm going to keep using Google.
Here is an example search of Obama Muslim. Now there is a search that you would expect to see a lot of "disappeared results" on Google. Could be some did disappear. But there are plenty that are left.
What I’m seeing is a different skill set than was necessary in the past, for basic survival.
Press one for ebonics?
Technology does not make workers redundant, it vastly increases their productivity. As a worker’s productivity increases, so does the value of their labor. As the value of the worker’s labor increases, he needs to work less to maintain a given standard of living. Technology may reach a point where the worker is so productive that he needs to work hardly at all to secure more than he could possibly consume.
Digging graves for other humans.
What he means to say is that AI is going to make dozens of people fabulously wealthy while turning thousands of meaningful jobs into hundreds of menial jobs.
1. As a practical political matter, there is virtually no chance that the government will stand by and permit market forces to work as automation sweeps through one industry after another creating job dislocations.
2. The difference between what is happening today and what happened in the early 19th century which triggered the Luddites has to do with the speed and comprehension of the digital revolution as opposed to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution took about 100 years to move the Western world from water power to steam power to petroleum power but the digital revolution is turning everything upside down in matters of months. 3. One reason among many that the government will not stay its hand from interfering with a Darwinian evolution in the Digital age is that the government is greatly financed through wages. Our retirement system (Social Security), our healthcare system today (Obama care), our unemployment insurance system, our federal individual income tax revenues to name three obvious cases fund the government and are politically potent.
4. The age of robots requires an accumulation of capital to cover the capital costs of setting up such an operation. That suggests that the robot age will to some degree favor those who were well-funded. Further, it is likely that successful robot operations will generate great wealth which will not be distributed as wages but might represent a concentration of wealth in few hands which the conventional wisdom regards to be an undesirable tendency.
5. The digital age also simply facilitates the outsourcing of many occupations that heretofore were held domestically. Just today, for example, an announcement has appeared that Google will be sending an enormous amount of jobs to India. It may be that the digital revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, will produce far more jobs than it kills, I am certainly one who believes that, but I also believe that the political realities will not abide a hands-off attitude when many of those jobs are not kept at home to replace those lost to robots but sent to the Third World.
If conservatism and capitalism are to survive we will have to provide answers to these developments which are coherent with capitalism and conservatism or forfeit the game to the left who surely will provide demagogic and self-serving solutions but which might prove very attractive to a beleaguered electorate.
If I can add something about the Luddites. As I recall reading about them, they only destroyed textile machines that did jobs poorly and were clearly created just to enrich the industrialist who owned it. If the machine actually improved upon the process of textiles, they did not destroy that machine.
Of course it does. I guess you have never worked. Dig a ditch. Long ago you might use five men or more. Introduce the
Backhoe. Now you need one maybe two. What happens to the others??? Oh, you need a guy to fix the backhoe. Generally the operator can do it. But even so if someone only knows how to handle a shovel it will take quite a while to “train” him. Who pays for his non labor during his “training”. And you don’t need four people to fix one backhoe. There is a great gap in those who can do things and those who have almost no skills. Thanks to our educational system it is only getting worse.
Over 94 million are out of work. Our country is still producing goods and services albeit at a reduced rate. It would seem we can get along without a vast majority of these workers. Except the fly in the ointment is our debt load. Trillions of dollars and climbing.
I am not against technology. I just think we need to look long and hard at the repercussions of highly advanced AI robots and our future society.
Going back to the backhoe example, I need one ditch dug. Not four or five. How does the backhoe increase the others productivity????
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