I see this recurring narrative that says people will be sidelined as automation expands to cut business costs. Don't people consider the new projects that stop being unworkable due to automation? In other words, automation can also enhance revenue as opposed to cutting cost. I find it curious that some people say that Socialism is the wave of the future because it will supposedly be needed to sustain all the people sidelined by automation. If anything sidelines people economically, it will be socialism that stifles economic creativity and the ability to grow the economy through automation.
I see this recurring narrative that says people will be sidelined as automation expands to cut business costs. Don't people consider the new projects that stop being unworkable due to automation? In other words, automation can also enhance revenue as opposed to cutting cost. I find it curious that some people say that Socialism is the wave of the future because it will supposedly be needed to sustain all the people sidelined by automation. If anything sidelines people economically, it will be socialism that stifles economic creativity and the ability to grow the economy through automation.
It depends on the quality of the automation. Full AI, where robots design, build, and maintain robots, will certainly eliminate the need for humans. I doubt all of it happens in my lifetime, but much of it will.
Truck drivers, engineers and pilots will be eliminated by self-driving trucks, trains, ships, planes, etc. 20 years, tops.
Most, but not yet all, clerical, middle management, accounting and other "paper pusher" jobs will be eliminated as orders are streamlined, going from point of sale directly into the computer, where it is then processed, routed, and the end product pumped out. AI will also handle all the logistics for shipping and crunching the numbers via automatic billing and accounting. We are well on the way to do that today.
Home building, maintenance, landscaping, etc is still human labor intensive. As is roadwork and providing utilities like gas, electric, water, etc. But, we'll start seeing that become more and more automated as time moves on. Just look at farming for an idea of how rapidly that can happen.
FYI:
Couple this with what I wrote in the first three paragraphs, and you can see how humans will eventually be cut out of the employment loop.
I strongly doubt that. to fully automate those types of vehicles to where no human is needed you need many systems. driving is only a small part of my job driving trucks. you a fully autonomous truck needs to be able to drive itself, fuel itself, do customer service, make deliveries, put on snow chains, hitch trailers, drop trailers, make mechanical repairs (I make a repair at least three times a month of the type where a single road service call would be my entire weeks of wages) and provide a deterrent to theft of the load. No one machine can do every task and they have to do it all cheaper then I do. I'm looking forward to the autopilot feature that I'm managing while I'm driving, but a fully autonomous vehicle is more then twenty years away.
Airliners likewise, pilots do many tasks not directly related to flying, and in those cases federal law mandates staffing anyway. The systems on airliners only work in predictable situations, they cannot function when confronted with emergency/unpredictable circumstances. no computer today can do what the aircrew on British Airways 9 did in Malaysia back in the 70s/ Technology will be developed to compliment labor and make it safer and more efficient, none of these systems come close to replacing it entirely.
and if it does and we're faced with millions upon millions of permanently unemployed people the government will just start regulating the technology or begin taxing it to such a point where it's not viable over hiring humans.
I'm not afraid of automation but I am afraid of the effect of automation on the American worker. People are getting just plain stupid. They rely on their computer to spit out answers to their questions and no longer have the capacity to determine whether those answers are accurate or even make sense.
while i doubt any ONE vehicle would fulfill all of those functions, i am not convinced that an array of devices would be unable to displace the function of the humans in any of those non-driving endeavors you listedI strongly doubt that. to fully automate those types of vehicles to where no human is needed you need many systems. driving is only a small part of my job driving trucks. you a fully autonomous truck needs to be able to drive itself, fuel itself, do customer service, make deliveries, put on snow chains, hitch trailers, drop trailers, make mechanical repairs (I make a repair at least three times a month of the type where a single road service call would be my entire weeks of wages) and provide a deterrent to theft of the load. No one machine can do every task and they have to do it all cheaper then I do. I'm looking forward to the autopilot feature that I'm managing while I'm driving, but a fully autonomous vehicle is more then twenty years away.
while i imagine on such piloting tasks there would be a human to oversee the robots' activities and assume the task at hand in the event of a critical failure of the dedicated machine, it remains reasonable to anticipate that the numbers of human workers would be significantly reduced by the introduction of advanced roboticsAirliners likewise, pilots do many tasks not directly related to flying, and in those cases federal law mandates staffing anyway. The systems on airliners only work in predictable situations, they cannot function when confronted with emergency/unpredictable circumstances. no computer today can do what the aircrew on British Airways 9 did in Malaysia back in the 70s/ Technology will be developed to compliment labor and make it safer and more efficient, none of these systems come close to replacing it entirely.
why hire humans with those taxes levied upon the successful robotic owner/operators? why not instead subsidize the living expenses of the displaced humans whose work is being performed by the robotsand if it does and we're faced with millions upon millions of permanently unemployed people the government will just start regulating the technology or begin taxing it to such a point where it's not viable over hiring humans.
lol...that reminds me of what happened about a week ago.
I created a quick spreadsheet to see how much steel I still needed to put on order this year to meet the demand for a certain product and what the cost would be. However, instead of just figuring out how many pounds of steel I needed for the year, digesting that number, and then dividing it by the number weeks remaining, and then calculating the cost per week, I got all fancy with it, writing a single formula that spat out a single answer in Dollars.
The number came out all screwy. Something like 5% of the price we were selling the parts. I knew that couldn't be right. Making it worse, I could not find my mistake until I rewrote the whole damned thing in stages, like I should have done to begin with. Turns out, my original formula pulled down a number that was in Kilograms instead of Pounds.
I see this recurring narrative that says people will be sidelined as automation expands to cut business costs. Don't people consider the new projects that stop being unworkable due to automation? In other words, automation can also enhance revenue as opposed to cutting cost. I find it curious that some people say that Socialism is the wave of the future because it will supposedly be needed to sustain all the people sidelined by automation. If anything sidelines people economically, it will be socialism that stifles economic creativity and the ability to grow the economy through automation.
I'm not afraid of automation but I am afraid of the effect of automation on the American worker. People are getting just plain stupid. They rely on their computer to spit out answers to their questions and no longer have the capacity to determine whether those answers are accurate or even make sense.
I can't quite agree with that. I don't think people generally are somehow getting dumber, I just think people who are dumb have increased in population. What makes you think people were on average actually smarter back in the day before automation and computerization? I seriously doubt that was so. Were average Joes working in manufacturing really that much more enlightened? Was there something about doing the same repetitive physical task over and over and over again making Joe more intelligent? Were workers who hand-harvested produce all hours of the day for hundreds of years prior to the digital age really that much more educated and informed and intelligent than people today? No, actually I would bet people were significantly dumber back then in many (not all) many ways.
Technology delivers at least as much good as not-so-good, because of the virtually infinite amount of information we can access in the palm of our hands from virtually everywhere using our smartphones and other computerized devices. Within a single generation, search engines have gotten so good that you can literally verbally blurt out a question and the technology will listen and produce an answer. That is insane. How could it be that not even having the easy access to this infinite amount of information makes us "dumber" than when we didn't have easy access to it?
Why do people need to internally store knowledge in their brains in order to be qualified as "smart?" If I suck at straight mental math but I know how to format an Excel spreadsheet in seconds with accurate and complex formulas, am I stupid (because of the mental math) or smart (because I can create perfect information quickly)? Who cares that I'm reliant on the technology? The technology produces the solution much more efficiently. All I need to know how to do is wield it.
Automation does not really cut costs, what it does is increase efficiency to cost ratio. For example 100 year ago you would have had 1000 women in a factory sewing shirts for sale, they would have been paid sweatshop wages in order for that business to even turn a profit, due to the high labor demand compared to the low uotput per employees, and let's face it 100 years ago no one would be willing to pay an ungodly amount for a shirt, automation did change that.
But in that example the machinery likely costs more to buy and maintain than those thousand women did, and people still need to be there to fix the machinery and inspect the end product. But where the profit would be made is lets say one sweatshop factory woman made 1-2 shirts a day, while a single machine could make a few hundred a day.
Basically though automation does not even get rid of jobs, it just shifts them into areas of skilled labor. This is where people resist automation, because instead of needing to be unskilled to do basic tasks, a job at that same factory would require knowledge in engineering, logistics, and mechanical/electrical/hydraulic repair.
Why do people need to internally store knowledge in their brains in order to be qualified as "smart?" If I suck at straight mental math but I know how to format an Excel spreadsheet in seconds with accurate and complex formulas, am I stupid (because of the mental math) or smart (because I can create perfect information quickly)? Who cares that I'm reliant on the technology? The technology produces the solution much more efficiently. All I need to know how to do is wield it.
It’s hard to appreciate just how many aspects of modern life rely on technologies that could be affected. As Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics told National Geographic in 2011, ”Every time you purchase a gallon of gas with your credit card, that’s a satellite transaction.” A giant storm could disrupt our GPS systems, communication with planes in flight and other crucial satellite-based technologies.
But the biggest concern, experts say, would be disruptions to our power grid—as a 2011 OECD report (PDF) on the impacts of solar storms points out, “Electric power is modern society’s cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend.” A surge in solar wind can blow out power transformers by melting their copper windings, and especially in highly interconnected regions (such as the East Coast), transformer failures can trigger cascading effects, spreading power outages over wide areas.
One analysis looked at a 1921 storm—which was ten times more powerful than the 1989 event—and estimated that if it occurred today, it would leave some 130 million people without power, potentially affecting water and food distribution, heating and air conditioning, sewage disposal and a host of other aspects of the infrastructure we take for granted daily. The total cost of an even larger storm, such as the 1859 event, could be enormous: an estimated $1 to $2 trillion in the first year alone, and a total recovery that could take 4 to 10 years in total.
I see this recurring narrative that says people will be sidelined as automation expands to cut business costs. Don't people consider the new projects that stop being unworkable due to automation? In other words, automation can also enhance revenue as opposed to cutting cost. I find it curious that some people say that Socialism is the wave of the future because it will supposedly be needed to sustain all the people sidelined by automation. If anything sidelines people economically, it will be socialism that stifles economic creativity and the ability to grow the economy through automation.
while i doubt any ONE vehicle would fulfill all of those functions, i am not convinced that an array of devices would be unable to displace the function of the humans in any of those non-driving endeavors you listed
while i imagine on such piloting tasks there would be a human to oversee the robots' activities and assume the task at hand in the event of a critical failure of the dedicated machine, it remains reasonable to anticipate that the numbers of human workers would be significantly reduced by the introduction of advanced robotics
why hire humans with those taxes levied upon the successful robotic owner/operators? why not instead subsidize the living expenses of the displaced humans whose work is being performed by the robots
think about a similar situation over 100 years ago; no one suggested the car manufacturers should be highly taxed to the point that the buggy whip manufacturer workers could remain employed
I see this recurring narrative that says people will be sidelined as automation expands to cut business costs. Don't people consider the new projects that stop being unworkable due to automation? In other words, automation can also enhance revenue as opposed to cutting cost. I find it curious that some people say that Socialism is the wave of the future because it will supposedly be needed to sustain all the people sidelined by automation. If anything sidelines people economically, it will be socialism that stifles economic creativity and the ability to grow the economy through automation.
Lord Zerg said:I am a software developer so I am literally building computer applications that replace work formerly done by people. The problem is that all these programs need is a software developer and only minor support once they are built. Unless new fields open up that can replace all the jobs that will be done by more and more advanced computers and machines controlled by them we are going to be in big trouble.
Yeah, I used to create automated or semi-automated replenishment purchasing and inventory systems, and sure, what I did created a job or two. But what I did also got rid of a bunch of jobs. For each job I created, I cut at least ten, and labor costs were reduced substantially overall. That was money taken out of the economy and put in the hands of a few people at the very top of the economic ladder.
People fear automation because automation means fewer jobs and less money being paid to human beings overall. Sounds to me like we are right to fear it.
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