Humans Need Not Apply - What Now?

[spud_meister]

Or maybe we just wind up with "Brave New World." :shrug:

Given today's culture, the latter seems more likely, to be frank. We're more than half-way there already.

In any eventuality, we'd basically be talking about fundamentally altering the human environment in a manner which has never existed before. Our instincts, as a species, simply aren't built for "post-scarcity" dynamics. Some of those instincts which would be affected are, in fact, the sexual variety, which directly ties into the question of reproduction.

Once that becomes a factor, so too does evolution.

I can't actually see humanity floating to one extreme or the other. Most people aren't psychotic animals or altruistic saints. I think we'd continue much as before, most people would find an occupation or hobby to fill in their time, be it carpentry (I believe there would be a demand for "unique" items) astrophysics or hunting. Some people would still try to control or harm others, some people would devote their time to helping the less fortunate, but these people, like in every point of human history, would be in the minority. A lot of petty, resource focused crime would be eliminated, but predatory and just ****ing insane people would still be around, leading to an ironic downturn in all crime, but the remaining crimes would be comparatively more horrific.

 

[Groogrux]

So, what do we do? Legal and illegal immigrant jobs are at risk of automation. No job is safe. So again, what do we do?

I don't have the answers. That's the purpose of this thread - to throw ideas out there and find the holes in the logic so we can all better our ideas to tackle the inevitability of our own future ecenomic irrelevance.

I wouldn't say that no job is safe. There are endless jobs that a robot could not replace; doctors, lawyers, EMTs, LEOs, most types of non-tangible sales positions, etc. The people that are going to be the most negatively affected are those at or below the poverty level. You mentioned McD's and those are exactly the type of jobs where a human can be replaced. I'll have to think about this more. But my first thought is we already don't have enough low-skill, livable wage jobs. If large corporations are going to be replacing humans with robots, we're going to need some type of regulation to counteract the disastrous effects it's going to have on the lower to lower middle class.

 

[RetiredNSmilin]

In my civilian jobs, I NEVER had to worry about any BOT taking my job.

In Marine Electronics, it is completely impossible for a BOT to board a vessel, find out what the problem is, troubleshoot the problem, then affect the repairs needed.

No BOT can climb a mast, solder on a new wind instrument, crawl under the console and fix the broken wires. Nor do a hundred other fixes that need to be done.

Not only no BOT can do it, but no illegal alien from Mexico can do it either.

Good pay and complete job security. There will ALWAYS be rich people with yachts, and there will ALWAYS be shipping.

If you want a really fun, insulated, & secure job that pays well, I recommend Marine Electronics.

 

[Northern Light]

If machines can supposedly replace humans then we should be able to get rid of money, or at least the form of struggle that humans go through to get it. But the bourgeoise want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to automate manufacturing but still have a thriving consumer base to buy their product, a base that has decreasing median income because they're being automated out. So who or what fills that financial gap? The government. It's basically government subsidies that are keeping this consumerist system alive, way past its expiry date. They either give trillions to corporations who should be long dead, or they give welfare to the unemployed to go out and keep buying crap.

We should be moving into post-capitalism by now but that's not what's happening. The middle class is disappearing and being replaced by low-paid service workers who are selling products to the little remaining privileged consumer base, or the government-subsidized consumer base. That, or the products get shipped overseas where developing countries are still drinking the consumer capitalist koolaid.

Seriously, if we want to see real change to the material inequities on this planet, we need to dismantle the old power that runs the financial system. How can there be effective Democracy if the People don't control the money?

Did you know that major computer brands (like Dell, Intel, etc.) in China can't sell direct to Chinese consumers? The products get shipped to the U.S. where they get re-sold back to China at 5 times the markup, due to licensing.

This system is crazy. The modern west is totally over the top now.

 

[David_N]

Automation is going to come either way, people who use it to argue against wage increases are silly.

 

[Mithrae]

Self checkout at Wal-Mart drives customers away. Self-checkout is not "robots taking over for workers" it's buyers performing labor workers use to do.

Maybe it's different in the US, but over here far more people use self-service than the cashier option (maybe Wal-Mart made the mistake of removing the choice altogether?). No-one likes human jobs being replaced, surely, but I for one prefer it to the plastic smiles, forced fake chit-chat and often clumsy packing skills of a minimum wage schoolkid. Technical glitches do occur of course, and on those rare occasions I help the human economy by simply walking away - so far they don't have robots to take my perishables back to their shelves :lol:


##

I wouldn't say that no job is safe. There are endless jobs that a robot could not replace; doctors, lawyers, EMTs, LEOs, most types of non-tangible sales positions, etc.

There are some aspects to many jobs which couldn't conceivably be replaced in the next few decades. That's not really the point: The point is that if much or most of the workload can be replaced, even plenty of folk with medical or law degrees will be out of a job. The OP video suggests that a great deal of legal work consists of fairly run of the mill paperwork - not so difficult to replace. Much of the work currently done by local GPs could likewise be conceiveably be replaced; there's already height/weight/blood pressure checking machines all around the place. It wouldn't be a great stretch to add stethoscopes and mouthoscopes and earoscopes, the ol' "cough once and turn your head," and even blood tests as the public catches on that machine error for re-using needles can be much lower than human error. Computer medical systems can remain up-to-date with an ever-growing body of medical literature far better than a human can; could access patients' medical records if requested far easier and quicker; could provide likely preliminary diagnoses in light of up-to-date local and regional trends more reliably than human doctors can.

Surgery is a cinch - we already trust computers far more with laser eye surgery than a shaky human hand, for crying out loud!

For the reasonably foreseeable future there'll be human work still available in many professions: But in all of those professions, there's also a lot of room for computers to take a bigger hand. In many cases, cost is a bigger limiting factor than technology.


##

The market will take care of this one way or another-the only question is how we will adapt.

This is probably the scariest post of the thread.

Not so long ago most people - and many people still - would say "God will take care of this one way or the other." The main difference here is that the market is explicitly and obviously a human creation, so appealing to it as an ultimate arbiter is an even more absurd expression of fundamentalism.

If unemployment pushes well past Great Depression levels, as seems plausible in the next half-century or so if nothing changes, and even currently high-paying jobs such as doctors and lawyers suffer severe wage drops as a result - whilst those who claim ownership of the growing robot labour force continue to swan around in isolated luxury - will the inevitable widespread riots, vandalism and thefts be a 'market' response, I wonder? Alternatively, will the private militias hired to prevent that eventuality represent a 'market' economy? Or would you just drop the pretense of a people's government altogether, elevate property above representation, and have the ownership class fund government armies to supress the masses?

 

[Mithrae]

The market will take care of itself, but that doesn't include those that are not in the market, which goes to your question - how do we adapt. That is also the point of this thread...

How do we adapt, or as I said in the thread title, what now?

I can't speak to humanity's course centuries in the future, but for the next few decades it seems many of the answers are already in place.

We're not facing a sudden end to human employment; we're facing a slow but steady replacement of perhaps half the jobs currently available over the next three or four decades. No-one wants to be slaving away for 40 hours a week on minimum wages while others are living modestly but comfortably on public handouts. But a hundred years ago most countries had a 50 or 60 hour work week, or even more!

This isn't exactly rocket science, to my mind: We want to maintain employment levels at 95% or more. Between automation and increasing female workforce participation that's been hard over the past century, so (among other reasons) the standard working week has reduced in length. We're facing still further reductions in workforce participation, due to even more intense automation possibilites, so what do we do? Hmm... bit of a puzzler, that :lol:

Some countries already have standard working weeks closer to 30 hours. One day they'll probably drop below 20

 

[Iamjesus]

95% of folks were peasant farmers.... What did society do when stopped growing rice?

100% of Eskimos lived off of seals and fish...probably zero today.

Meh...humans are humans. Nobody in 2016 knows what the work world will be like in a hundred years. Trying to predict the demise of society because of 'X' variable is like some 15th century futurist trying to predict the world of 2016 after seeing a printing press.

There's a hundred or a thousand variables and 'what ifs'.

 

[Beaudreaux]

Technological communism hasn't been tried before. It's a system where goods and services is supplied by automation. Say you want a Lamborghini. You press the Lamborghini button and it sends an order to robots to mine or produce the materials needed, robots shape them, assemble the car, test drive it and ship it to your door. Because of the totality of automated labour, this production process costs nothing, as robots don't need to be paid. This makes material goods worthless, and negates the need for any sort of market. People are free to pursue intellectual or physical activities at their leisure without having to earn their daily bread and so science and the arts flourish, we develop ways to mine materials from space and all sorts of good stuff happens.

Okay, I can see that now. However, given the number of people we have refusing to work now, what would those people and countless others do when work is not required? I can guarantee you that their intellect is not what would be expanded. It would be their waistline and their already big ol' butts. I don't see how that would work, although that may be the only option available if technology takes over every level of the economy from invention to realization to production to sales and then recycling and waist disposal. As a communist, you may feel that this would be good... The fact that this may be where we are actually headed scares the hell out me, to be totally honest.

 

[Beaudreaux]

More jobs for automation repair technicians like myself!

That's true, until the repair bots and programming bots put you out of a job as well.

 

[Beaudreaux]

Self checkout at Wal-Mart drives customers away. Self-checkout is not "robots taking over for workers" it's buyers performing labor workers use to do.

McDonalds Self order computers are the same.

Do you have any empirical data to this claim? A peer reviewed study, for instance?

McDonalds and Wal-Mart have endless money to pay their workers extremely well and they can't thrive without their workers.

Again, do you have any empirical data to support this claim?

The people can't unionize because the Corporation/s are too big.

Unions have nothing to do with the thread topic.

If the Monopolies paid their workers well, we wouldn't be seeing a need for a change in minimum wage.

Supply and demand comes to mind to explain why what you state here is not going to happen. As long as customers demand low cost goods and services and people will work for a low wage in a low to no skill job to allow for low cost goods and services, then that's what companies will pay employees to keep their customers happy. In reality, it's the customer demanding low prices that keeps wages low.

Instead the only people making money are the ones that have never been in the building. [/QUOTE Not really sure what that means.

A change will come in some way shape or form. You can't steal the shirt off the back of workers anymore. Workers don't demand much until you keep all. Then you get.....the OP.

What? If people (workers) act like you say here, then business will make the investment in automation to get rid of the headache that you describe here. I'm not sure how that is bad for business, but it is damn sure bad for the workers, which will be ex-workers.

Latest news; I heard Wal-Mart is closing lot's of centers. Weird how forcing customers to work causes that.

No, low performing stores cause that. Where do you get your information about what you determine Walmart's decisions are based upon?

 

[Beaudreaux]

I wouldn't say that no job is safe. There are endless jobs that a robot could not replace; doctors, lawyers, EMTs, LEOs, most types of non-tangible sales positions, etc.

You must not have watched the entire video. Bots are already starting to be found in the operating room. Bots are already being developed by the US DoD to act as medics on the battlefield, and that technology will work its way to the civilian world. Lawyers could be one of the very first professionals to find themselves replaced by bots, since paralegals and legal secretaries are already being replaced by computer programs. LEO's? Ever seen the movie Robocop?

The people that are going to be the most negatively affected are those at or below the poverty level. You mentioned McD's and those are exactly the type of jobs where a human can be replaced. I'll have to think about this more. But my first thought is we already don't have enough low-skill, livable wage jobs. If large corporations are going to be replacing humans with robots, we're going to need some type of regulation to counteract the disastrous effects it's going to have on the lower to lower middle class.

What I was hoping this thread would do is to elicit feedback on what to do when it happens rather than debate whether it will happen or not.

 

[Beaudreaux]

I can't speak to humanity's course centuries in the future, but for the next few decades it seems many of the answers are already in place.

We're not facing a sudden end to human employment; we're facing a slow but steady replacement of perhaps half the jobs currently available over the next three or four decades. No-one wants to be slaving away for 40 hours a week on minimum wages while others are living modestly but comfortably on public handouts. But a hundred years ago most countries had a 50 or 60 hour work week, or even more!

This isn't exactly rocket science, to my mind: We want to maintain employment levels at 95% or more. Between automation and increasing female workforce participation that's been hard over the past century, so (among other reasons) the standard working week has reduced in length. We're facing still further reductions in workforce participation, due to even more intense automation possibilites, so what do we do? Hmm... bit of a puzzler, that :lol:

Some countries already have standard working weeks closer to 30 hours. One day they'll probably drop below 20

I'm not so sure about that. I thought the way you do above, until I started actually looking at the way technology is advancing and the speed at which it is occurring and the lowering of costs via the economy of scale. Just 20 years ago we didn't have smart phones, and the Space Shuttle was operated by a computer that was less than 1/1000th the speed and power of a modern cell phone. Now we have cars that park themselves and stop themselves to prevent crashes. We already have (in California) self driving cars being sold and used on public highways. It won't be too long before that technology is used by taxi cab companies, bus companies, and all public transportation. We already have trains running without operators at airports and in cities for public transportation. And those are just a few examples of how the bots are already taking over jobs. I now feel that within the next 20 years, we will see more than most of the basic labor jobs being taken over by bots.

 

[Ntharotep]

Robot writers are not yet a proven success (readable, enjoyable by a majority of readers of the genre, etc.) so I might be Ok.
I don't really have anything else to add when taking the approach "this will happen no ifs, ands, or buts..."

 

[Frank Apisa]

Some people see the problem.

Some will not see it.

Mostly human want to wait until crisis occurs before dealing with a problem. Dealing with problems before crisis stage seems almost beyond our capabilities.

The notion of "earning one's living" is an anachronism.

We've got to figure a way to have the machines working for all of us...so that each of us has sufficient without having to work.

Big problem.

Probably gonna take more than the talent we have here to solve.

 

[Frank Apisa]

What I was hoping this thread would do is to elicit feedback on what to do when it happens rather than debate whether it will happen or not.

What we ought to be aiming for is what to do before "it happens"...or before we go critical mass.

I have my doubts that we will.

 

[woodsman]

We keep hearing the labor advocates demanding a $15.00 (or $10.10 or some other number) minimum wage for McDonalds (just as an example - I don't want this thread to be about any particular company) workers and we see business advocates showing that McDonalds is already moving toward technology to save money by reducing the need to have humans as employees. Most people don't understand that BOTH factions are creating the environment that is hastening the technological end to the need for human jobs. All jobs.

Computerized machines (bots) do not need days off, do not make mistakes, do not require costly medical insurance, do not go on strike, do not have babies or requiring more time off to deal with the baby, and so on and so on. Bots don't get sick, or have emotional problems, or talk back to supervisors, or sabotage production, or have Twitter accounts where they disclose to the world what happened at work today, or sexually harass fellow employees, and so on and so on... again. I hope you see the point.

The video below is about 15 minutes long, but is more than worth the time if only to get you thinking about what our future holds. And, that future is not as far off as many would hope to believe. In fact, in many instances, the future is now.

I would like this thread to be a discussion of not whether bots will take all of our jobs (because the fact that they will is already at hand) but rather I would hope that this thread could be a place for us to discuss what we can do to prepare for, and survive, the coming truth - that none of our jobs are safe.

I found the first statement in the video rather telling how the rest would go, paraphrasing, Re: humans are lazy and it’s the only reason they come up with innovation.

Another would be, robots are capable of making the same decisions as humans, I don’t think so….

The video also asserts that self driving cars are (Already) better than human controlled as a gauge for point. That’s false…

 

[calamity]

We keep hearing the labor advocates demanding a $15.00 (or $10.10 or some other number) minimum wage for McDonalds (just as an example - I don't want this thread to be about any particular company) workers and we see business advocates showing that McDonalds is already moving toward technology to save money by reducing the need to have humans as employees. Most people don't understand that BOTH factions are creating the environment that is hastening the technological end to the need for human jobs. All jobs.

Computerized machines (bots) do not need days off, do not make mistakes, do not require costly medical insurance, do not go on strike, do not have babies or requiring more time off to deal with the baby, and so on and so on. Bots don't get sick, or have emotional problems, or talk back to supervisors, or sabotage production, or have Twitter accounts where they disclose to the world what happened at work today, or sexually harass fellow employees, and so on and so on... again. I hope you see the point.

The video below is about 15 minutes long, but is more than worth the time if only to get you thinking about what our future holds. And, that future is not as far off as many would hope to believe. In fact, in many instances, the future is now.

I would like this thread to be a discussion of not whether bots will take all of our jobs (because the fact that they will is already at hand) but rather I would hope that this thread could be a place for us to discuss what we can do to prepare for, and survive, the coming truth - that none of our jobs are safe.

My job is safe from bots because I have to make sure that what engineering designs is what marketing sold and the customer wants, then I have to make sure that what engineering designs the shop actually builds. After all that, I then have to take what the shop builds but does not work properly back to the engineers so that they can design something that actually works, but before I can take that back to the shop to be rebuilt, I have to be sure the customer will want it that way or if we need to go back to engineering to redesign it some more. Job security at least until I retire, I am sure.

 

[Beaudreaux]

What we ought to be aiming for is what to do before "it happens"...or before we go critical mass.

I have my doubts that we will.

I doubt we will either. However, I don't know what we could do before "it happens" since this is a global phenomenon, not restricted to the US, which means that whatever we do could only harm us in the global market and put us in an even more weak position to recover from later.

 

[Beaudreaux]

I found the first statement in the video rather telling how the rest would go, paraphrasing, Re: humans are lazy and it’s the only reason they come up with innovation.

Another would be, robots are capable of making the same decisions as humans, I don’t think so….

The video also asserts that self driving cars are (Already) better than human controlled as a gauge for point. That’s false…

Being that all three of your statements are not accurate, I can understand why you don't believe the potential is real.

 

[Beaudreaux]

My job is safe from bots because I have to make sure that what engineering designs is what marketing sold and the customer wants, then I have to make sure that what engineering designs the shop actually builds. After all that, I then have to take what the shop builds but does not work properly back to the engineers so that they can design something that actually works, but before I can take that back to the shop to be rebuilt, I have to be sure the customer will want it that way or if we need to go back to engineering to redesign it some more. Job security at least until I retire, I am sure.

I hope you are correct. I truly do. I don't think you are, but I hope for yours and others sake, you are.

 

[woodsman]

Being that all three of your statements are not accurate, I can understand why you don't believe the potential is real.

Please listen to the first sentence of the video. As for the driverless cars, the video had a whole section on it, It was clearly stated they are safer. I’m unclear why you would dispute your own video?

 

[Beaudreaux]

Please listen to the first sentence of the video. As for the driverless cars, the video had a whole section on it, It was clearly stated they are safer. I’m unclear why you would dispute your own video?

Your interpretation is what I dispute. However, the topic of the thread is what should we do when and if the need for human labor no longer exists or is at least reduced to a point that it dramatically impacts our economy, not to argue over the video.

 

[Frank Apisa]

I hope you are correct. I truly do. I don't think you are, but I hope for yours and others sake, you are.

I hope Calamity is correct also...but I suspect many people who think they are safe from the effects of this sesa change...are kidding themselves.

One of the side effects is going to be that the jobs which HAVE TO BE done by humans...will be the object of great contest. Only someone who can outperform the hordes of people who will be wanting and applying for those jobs will truly be safe. Only the most productive will be allowed to man the jobs that absolutely have to be done by non-machines (!).

Many people have seen this problem coming and have been writing about it. I wrote my first op ed piece on it almost 30 years ago...and have never relented.

I hope the transition to the new economy is as disruption-free as possible. But knowing human nature, I expect it may include riots and revolution.

Luckily, I will be 80 this year. I probably will shed this mortal coil before the oompah hit the fan in full force.

 

[calamity]

I hope you are correct. I truly do. I don't think you are, but I hope for yours and others sake, you are.

I think it serves as an appropriate example for why a lot of jobs will not be eliminated completely. What will happen though is the jobs which remain will require uniquely human skills.