Oso planning to go pro
Not true, new technology typically creates more jobs than it kills. It easy to see jobs that go away, hard to imagine the new jobs it will create. So, it leaves one with the impression that it kills jobs.See Northwestern's Bob Gordon at this MIT conference http://futureofwork.mit.edu/Examples13,000 taxis in NYC. Uber/Lyft/Ridesharing has killed about half the taxi jobs. But it has also created over 50,000 ridesharing jobs in NYC. Uber is a net creator of jobs.My favorite ... the invention the spreadsheet killed off the "bookkeeper" but created far more jobs as "financial analysts." The spreadsheet was not a killer of jobs or the accounting industry, it was a creator of jobs and fundamentally changed what an accountant does.Wall Street JournalAugust 2, 2017We Survived Spreadsheets, and We’ll Survive AIHistory shows technology fuels new kinds of jobs in addition to the ones it renders obsoletehttps://www.wsj.com/articles/wesurvived-spreadsheets-and-well-survive-ai-1501688765Then along came personal computers and spreadsheet programs VisiCalc in 1979, Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983 and Microsoft Excel a few years later. Suddenly, you could change one number—say, this year’s rent—and instantly recalculate costs, revenues and profits years into the future. This simplified routine bookkeeping while making many tasks possible, such as modeling alternate scenarios.“You could play the what-if game. You know, what if I did this instead of that?” accountant Allen Sneider, the first registered buyer of VisiCalc, told NPR’s “Planet Money” in 2015 for a retrospective on spreadsheets.The new technology pummeled demand for bookkeepers: their ranks have shrunk 44% from two million in 1985, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet people who could run numbers on the new software became hot commodities. Since 1985, the ranks of accountants and auditors have grown 41%, to 1.8 million, while financial managers and management analysts, which the BLS didn’t even track before 1983, have nearly quadrupled to 2.1 million.Just as spreadsheets drove costs down and demand up for calculations, machine learning—the application of AI to large data sets—will do the same for predictions, argue Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb, who teach at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Prediction about uncertain states of the world is an input into decision making,” they wrote in a recent paper. ----------Tellers were not killed by the ATM, we have more tellers now than ever. E-commerce is not killing retailing jobs, we have more e-commerce jobs than we lost in brick and mortar retailing. Again, it is hard to imagine the new jobs automation creates, easy to see the jobs it displaces.Wall Street JournalSeptember 5, 2017Workers: Fear Not the Robot ApocalypseAutomation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. A case in point: U.S. retailinghttps://www.wsj.com/articles/workers-fear-not-the-robot-apocalypse-1504631505?mg=prod/accounts-wsjThose fears have repeatedly proven baseless. James Bessen, an economist at Boston University School of Law, has found in numerous episodes when technology was supposed to annihilate jobs, the opposite occurred. After the first automated tellers were installed in the 1970s, an executive at Wells, Fargo & Co. predicted ATMs would lead to fewer branches with even fewer staff. And indeed, the average branch used one-third fewer workers in 2004 than in 1988. But, Mr. Bessen found, ATMs made it much cheaper to operate a branch so banks opened more: Total branches rose 43% over that time. Today, banks employ more tellers than in 1980 and their duties have expanded to things ATMs can’t do such as “relationship banking.”---Retail is easily the largest U.S. industry now facing digital disruption and yet there is strong evidence e-commerce hasn’t reduced overall employment and has likely added to it. It is true that thousands of stores have closed. Between the end of 2007 and the middle of 2017, brick-and-mortar retailers lost the equivalent of 140,000full-time jobs, according to a forthcoming report by Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. Electronic shopping jobs rose by only 126,000 in the same period.But, Mr. Mandel notes, that excludes many jobs at fulfillment centers such as Fall River, which the federal Bureau of Labor Statisticstends to count in warehousing and storage. He notes that Kentucky had just 3,213 e-commerce workers in 2016 according to the BLS, yet Amazon employs more than 12,000 there. Warehousing has added 274,000 jobs nationwide since 2007. Mr. Mandel argues all of those are attributable tofulfillment centers and that thus total e-commerce employment has grown 401,000, nearly three times the brick-and-mortar drop. Mr. Mandel finds that fulfillment centers pay on average 31% better than brick and mortar stores in the same
My best guess. 3-5 years from now automation is accessible but still slightly rare. Like seeing electric or hybrids. Human must be in driver seat and being attentive.6-12 years - Common sight. 50% of cars are automated. Laws are relaxed as to attentiveness. 12-18 years - automation is almost a given. Still some drivers who want to drive themselves(kind of like manuals) attentive driver laws are completely removed. Cars are being made with seats facing inwards instead of towards windshield. Those who do not yet have driver licenses will never recieve them. 20+ Human driving is illegal.
Just an fyi on the Uber one, it pretty much killed jobs. The rideshare payments are so cheap because of how little the employees are actually paid. Since they have to pay for their own wear and tear, gas, and commercial insurance (which uber doesn't tell you about, so if you crash while ubering, guess whos paying for all the damages). I believe someone did the math and figured out the average 15 d/hr, is actually more around 3.
The majority of the people who are being "obsoleted" are people that had almost no actual skill sets (calculus metaphor was a....metaphor, not literal). They are people who were physically performing activities with little to no actual intellect or training involved and very likely getting to retirement age anyway. With technological advancement hard things get easy(limited training/intellect) and new things are found that are hard to do(requiring higher education/intellect).Example: Think of the ipad, my grandmother can't really use it but my two year old will easily in the next year if we let him.
So what do you do? Do you block technological progress for the benefit of the few at the detriment of the many?
Regarding Uber ... are you saying people don't act in their own best interest? Becuase every Uber driver I ask says they making enough money to make it worth their while.
I know it was a metaphor, but it was an apt metaphor. Jobs are being upskilled, but there is a significant segment of workers that don't have the ability to upskill. You are optimistic that technology will solve this, but I am less so.A lot of the voter anger we've seen is due to a stagnant or declining middle class. You've got factory workers, textile workers, miners, and soon to be drivers, etc. out of jobs with no hope of finding equivalent replacements. Even for those that have the capability to upskill, there are far fewer jobs required to run new factories and the like.Lesser skilled, repetitive, mechanical work has been the first to be replaced, but the process will work it's way up the chain. I've long thought that doctors will be obsoleted before nurses; nurses are needed for hands-on deliver of health care, but what do doctors do better than AI can?I hope you are correct and I am wrong.
I don't have an answer for your first question. Basic living wage for all? That solves the issue of people from starving to death, but I'm not sure what society ends up looking like.I assume your second question is rhetorical.
There is an approximately 0% chance that human driving will be illegal in 20 years.
And why is that? Robots are proven to be way safer and reliable. They don't fall asleep. They don't text. They don't lose focus. They don't drink. This is actually very similar to the gun argument in the other thread. Does your need to feel freedom and be able to drive supercede those who would be alive if humans were banned from driving?
The gun argument shows exactly why human driving will still be legal. Americans like their cars. They like to drive. FREEDOM!! That isn't going to be given up easily regardless of the validity of the idea.
2nd I believe the car debate will go quite differently then the gun debate has.
No way. People like to be in control. Hence, why so many fear flying when it's a far, far safer mode of transit.
The major concern I have is not with people starving or standards of living shrinking. EVERYTHING (food, housing, travel, medical care, etc.,) will be cheaper and more accessible. Just as there is much more money available to aid the poor or those "left behind" today than there was 50 or 100 years ago, there will be that much more available in the future. I worry instead that too many will feel useless or left out even if their basic needs are provided - a kind of dispiriting of America. Right now we have too many "working poor" here. Will much greater numbers of non working lower middle or middle class be an improvement? I think so, but I'm not so sure.
What about the truck stop hookers?
Replaced with sex robots. Duh.
Companion robots will change the world more than autodrivers. They won't just be a pervert's toy, they will be pervasive, with men and women giving up the aggravation of pursuit and relationship maintenance with real humans, opting for the utterly gorgeous and wildly accommodating robot companion.Tell me that's not true. You have faith in humanity's desire to be with real humans? Uh huh.
And with that, down goes the birth rate for unwanted pregnancies. Unemployment problem solved.Eat Arby's!
Most of the studies I've seen say that long-haul trucker is about the worst job in the United States ... low pay, barely move at work (no exercise), eat crappy food, away from home a lot, boring.
Also, the long term thinking is if long-haul driver assisted trucks can drive between say 10PM - 6AM can they allow them to go faster than the posted speed limit. Again they are heavily driver assisted so they are safer than human only. And if they stay off the roads between, say, 7AM - 7PM we all benefit without that traffic clogging highways. But, in the future, you might see caravans of self-driving or driver assisted truck screaming down the interstate at 3AM at 100+ MPH each truck taking turns breaking the wind like a tour de France peloton.
Honestly, as we move more toward truly autonomous driving, I'm thinking the person sitting in the cab would be more akin to a security guard than a driver. It seems to me like interstate piracy could become an issue if all cargo was being shipped via autonomous trucks.
The progression will be through insurance. You are free to drive your car but human driving insurance could be up to 10x driverless insurance. So, the car drives, $300/year in insurance. You drive, up to $3,000/year. Double it for your wife, quadruple it for one kid that wants to drive.It will become prohibitively expensive. Then human drivers will be a nuisance and we will ban them.Horses were the same way. Americans will never give up their horse in 1900. Autos took over because they were cheaper. Then the luddites that continued to use horses in cities were a nuisance and we banned them.
Yep. If you don't believe it, watch the movie "Her". I saw that movie when it first came out in 2013 and it's coming true even faster than the movie predicted.I clearly remember a scene where everyone walking around looking at their phones instead of each other and thinking, "Wow, that's sad". And a couple of years later, it was happening in real life.
Wow, I'm very concerned for Benny. Being able to mimic Myron Medcalf's writing so closely implies an oncoming case of dementia.