Technology Will Kill White-Collar Jobs
forbes.com
forbes.com
Not buying it - we have specialization and professionalization in part to maintain quality of work. Everyone cannot be, and should not be, an artist.
Anyways, if no one had to work, most people would just do drugs.
And when people do have to work, they just alternate between drugs that make them better workers, and drugs that let them forget work.
Unless we change the blueprint in a massive way, we won't do well in a life of complete leisure.
But not if there's nothing to do at all.
Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. I'm all for automation and AI doing the grunt work, but I don't want to live in a zoo. We should take the benefits of automation and continue to struggle and exert ourselves, and seek out greater challenges than we could before. Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.
Well, that's the status quo.
> Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. [...] Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.
You would be welcome to work as much as you like, of course. Obstacles would be self-selected, not assigned by chance or force.
If you live in my hypothetical utopian society and truly feel that humanity must suffer so that you can derive meaning from "the struggle", you might have to emigrate to a polity of like-minded masochists.
People were saying the same things in the Edwardian era about progress solving all of life's problems. Then we started World War I to a large degree because people were bored and wanted stimulation. This is just another utopian prediction that won't come true.
The work we do is not arbitrary bullshit. Civilization takes work to maintain and grow.
I don't think there will be robots to do all the housework for everyone. And there are many areas in the world where it will just not be worth it to automate many things unless you have robots that are as cheap to make and run as humans, and want to exist there by their own right, and also behave like biological beings in the face of environmental influences (sea spray, I'm looking at you).
So take away the hard work in large-scale agriculture, production, research, medical care..., and you are still left with a large amount of things to do. Also, there is a lot that just gives satisfaction from doing it yourself, like making clothes, a house, or cooking. I don't have to make the best meal ever to find it worth it.
Though, I must say that I subscribe to the notion that creating AI will very likely be the last big impact we will have on history. We will just live while AI will thrive.
The people whose hobby is farming, building or something else of the sort would be quite able to keep doing that in a post-scarcity robot utopia (assuming we really get there). It would just not be something they do for commercial gain.
Why let them thrive uncontested? What's stopping us from using our own resources for self improvement of our mental facilities. I don't necessarily want to be a Jupiter Brain, I'd be willing to settle for a intergalactic iron man suit with brain enhancement, interfaces, or reworks.
True, but that might actually be the challenge. There's too much space out there.
I live in California. Let's say the Sun is a soccer ball right here next to me. Then the Earth is a large grain of sand a few meters away. Jupiter is a marble a few blocks down the road. Speed of light is like an ant running.
And the nearest star is another soccer ball way out in Greenland. Think about that for a second.
http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...
To get out of the confines of the solar system, we need some massive breakthrough. Probably entirely new physics.
I'm not saying we'll never make it. I'm saying the magnitude of the effort is enormous. In a sense, Sart Trek and Star Wars have done a disservice to space exploration by making it seem so easy.
The scales of energy, time, and complexity involved are colossal.
But if we have to go through intermediate point where 50% of humanity needs to be on the job to keep the lights on and the other 50% can live the life of leisure, how do we decide who's in which 50% without dangerous social upheavals?
[1] Assuming we don't kill ourselves or get sent back to the stone age with nuclear weapons or AI run amok.
1. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
2. http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/02/news/economy/sweden-6-hour-w...
An obvious first step is a basic income, paid for by military spending cuts and increase on corporate, capital gains and high earner taxes. This will show people that such an idea is sustainable, so they can prepare their mind for the coming utopia.
Yes, we all agree. No one disputes that. This article is more about Jeff Greene's conference and biography than it is about automation. Reads like an advertorial.
Wait, I can write a script to do that...
Wonder if human made could become the next organic, at least among certain hipster types...
I also wonder whether a certain amount of this 'technology will kill jobs' stuff overlooks a small business issue that a certain few people don't seem to get. Namely, that the businesses that do well aren't always the fastest producing ones or the ones that make the 'best' products in some statistical sense. After all, about 90% of sites online are simply made obsolete by other, usually more popular ones. But many of them still gain an audience, even without being the 'best' at something or posting about it the quickest. All these talks and articles seem to assume the equivalents to Walmart and McDonalds will win in all markets because 'robots do things better/cheaper' and completely overlook such things as customer loyalty, branding, location or anything else.
AI is going to be an issue, but I think it's a tad premature to say all businesses will turn to it, or that businesses that aim for a more niche audience and care about the service more than the price will somehow stop being able to do well.
If you are a web designer, your connection is through a computer. Not sure robots can be creative (not yet anyways)
If you are a sales person, your connection will be through a phone (I don't think we are anywhere close to where a computer can make a judgement call based on speaking cues)
Even graphic design could be done by an AI running a genetic algorithm, with automated A/B testing as the fitness function.
Don't complain about boring, tedious boilerplate being removed, the removal just frees up our time for more interesting work.
No, because the first wave of white collar jobs to go has already been happening, and it is mostly middle management. (I suspect the next wave will be a lot of domain-specialized professionals in research/analytical roles -- but not so much solution design and implementation -- roles.)
Are you serious? All we do outside of work is consume others' creativity.
And if income inequality increase, there will be less consumers able to consume that increased supply, further lowering the value of the supply of music. The "winners" of the situation who end up with more income do not have additional time to consume ever more greater quantities of music, while the losers have less money and potentially also less time (if they need to work more to make ends meet).
Edit: Also, given your wording of the question it seems like you aren't a producer of creative content yourself, so perhaps you aren't as directly aware of the trend I'm describing above, which has already had a serious effect upon an already difficult-to-pursue profession.