Why Dilbert Is Doomed
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Traditionally, a humongous proportion came here to the US and its workers, again due to historical reasons (and personally i feel deservedly so or atleast close enough). But it basically went like the US increase the whole pie so much that it got more of it. But as globalization happens it is apparent that unless you are a capitalist, your share of the distribution simply has no reason to grow but a lot of pressure to shrink so that it equalizes more globally.
so i think short of the US coming up with more things that just dramatically increases the whole pie again, theres only two choices to maintain your standard of living, have capital so you have the power to get your share, or support some form of socialism that hopefully doesn't reduce incentive to the point of reducing the whole pie.
If you have a great idea, it takes less money and effort to develop it and spread it around. Capital actively looks for you. Take any of the support services to business as examples (from printing to telecommunication - long distance fees anyone? mobile phones? to computing power to manufacturing). Who cares what percentage of the pie you have? It's your living standards that matter - and that's what's risen dramatically for almost every socio economic and demographic group with the exception of a few in places like Africa who live under horrific despots. I can't remember who first made the comment that the average 12 year old today gets more intellectual stimulation than Queen Victoria might have in her day.
You can lament the fact that even if you're extraordinarily successful you might not control as much resources as Bill Gates does as a percentage of the pie, but look a little further back in history to those like Rockefeller, JP Morgan, who controlled even more and wielded considerably more power. Is Bill Gates' life better than theirs? I would suggest that with the exception of the ability to use their power (which has declined considerably) nearly all other metrics would suggest this is the case. This, at least for the rest of us, seems like a good thing to me.
This idea that short term unemployment is relevant to anything at all is somewhat silly since it doesn't even begin to explain US unemployment versus Europe's chronically high unemployment rates. Further, while I can accept that industries change, this fear that technology results in less employment just doesn't track with history.
The pie grows with better ideas. With the average person increasingly being able to contribute directly to the development ideas, I suspect we will have a considerably brighter future than some of these pundits suggest.
PS: The ability for science and technology to progress has had a lot to do with the number of people who focus on such things, when 80% of the world is developed we might see 10 times as much research which is then quickly spread around the globe. And like the old VC equation having 1/3 of 50 trillion is worth less than 1/20th of 5,000 trillion.
There are plenty of jobs that will be automated in the next decade. What will those workers do?
I am really unclear what you think unskilled labor is.
There are many cashiers, food service workers, and custodial workers today, and I don't think that kind of unskilled labor has much of a future.
No we aren't. We are no closer now than we were 50 years ago. The hardware is faster, but the software has not changed. (And hardware is not getting faster anymore either.)
Looking at what Asimo can do today it seems to me we're not far away from the latter; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ByGQGiVMg
The physical, mechanics part seems to be mostly sorted out. Robots can walk, run, climb stairs, avoid obstacles, get up when they fall, lift heavy things or operate at incredible precision. It won't be long until they exceed us humans in most physical regards (with a few notable exceptions like smelling or touch-sensitive skin, but imho even that is only a matter of time).
In my opinion the really interesting research is now going into the stuff you see in the video above. Making robots discover and interact intelligently with their environment. This is still a far cry from real intelligence but try to imagine the impact when robots become able to execute simple instructions like "Make me a coffee", "Drag the couch from A to B" or even "Repair the plumbing" without further handholding.
That will be the tipping point for a huge shift in society, akin to the invention of bookprinting or the internet, likely even bigger.
Looking at what we have today I would say that specific vision is just a matter of time. Whatever follows then is in the pudding.
Perhaps this will be a real issue, or perhaps robot engineers are a bit too fond of Terminator and 2001. Fear of it is apparently causing real effects. It would be sad if the ultimate reason to employ humans is that it feels good to kick their arses when things go wrong.
Not even remotely close. In fact, if we ever want to reach a point where computers are as intelligent as humans are, we are likely going to have to start from the ground up with the way we build processors.
Our computers rely on precision, our brains rely on lack thereof. Our brains were "built" from the beginning to match fuzzy patterns. I look at a door and I know immediately that it is a door, even if I can only see part of it and have never seen one that looks anything like it before. Computers are terrible at this. We're getting sortof-kindof-maybe close by applying bayesian filters to images, but you're talking about rooms full of specialized hardware that cannot even compete with the brain of a mouse.
Additionally, that which makes us intelligent (what a delightfully indescribable word that is) is partially our creativity; which is something that computers are absolutely incapable of in their current form.
Sorry, but it is probably going to be a while before engineers, or architects, or programmers, or babysitters are replaced by any sort of "machine intelligence".
However, I wonder if the exponential growth of technology will mean that we'll suddenly see a lot of progress in a short space of time.
This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.
The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?
It would be great for society if we all reached the point where perhaps 5% of workers covered our basic human needs and the other 95% were paid to entertain and do academic/scientific research to further improve our standard of living.
That is my expectation for a bright future for humanity.
We have drought and flood resistant crops, we have assembly lines, we have heavy machinery, and yet the majority of the world's population lives without clean water and regular meals. There is a huge reservoir of work which needs to be done but because of the degenerate governments, is not getting done.
On the other end of the spectrum, wealthy countries are expanding the definition of what basic needs are. Just last month, Finland declared that broadband internet access is a right of every citizen [1]. All of a sudden you have, by government mandate, a new service which must be provided to every corner of the country.
So on the one hand you have all this latent potential and on the other hand you have ever growing demand for services. I just don't see the artificial jobs/services limit ever being an issue, even though we've long had the means to cloth and feed every man, woman and child on earth.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/i...
American society has no way to deal with a situation where half of the workers are unemployed. During the Great Depression at its very worst, 25% of the population was unemployed. In the robotic future, where 50 million jobs are lost, there is the potential for 50% unemployment. The conventional wisdom says that the economy will create 50 million new jobs to absorb all the unemployed people, but that raises two important questions:
What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population.
Why isn't the economy creating those new jobs now? Today there are millions of unemployed people. There are also tens of millions of people who would gladly abandon their minimum wage jobs scrubbing toilets, flipping burgers, driving trucks and shelving inventory for something better. This imaginary new category of employment does not hinge on technology -- it is going to employ people, after all, in massive numbers -- it is going to employ half of today's working population. Why don't we see any evidence of this new category of jobs today?
Thank goodness all of that human capital will be freed up to explore the new frontiers.
More seriously, I think there are a couple of possible meanings to the '-ary' progression: if more abstract, making use of the lower levels, the quintary must be finance. If the progression is 'less directly crucial to life', then it probably is the whole service sector. Entertainment would be pretty far out there.
A 'mixed feeling' aspect to this is, that free software is greatly helping this along.
I don't think that jobs that can't be automated will in demand unless they also add to US competitiveness on the world market. If healthcare or education is just about bloat, it's not going to grow forever...
I was counseled that there would be few opportunities in electrical engineering, four graudates to every job. But in journalism there would be four jobs for every student.
So I chose Journalism and in four years it was exactly the reverse. You have as much chance of these guys being right as knowing what the weather would be like in a month.
Honestly! If these jobs are eliminated, that's a wonderful thing! It increases the average work that the average worker is doing. This increases their average salary. This is not a problem!
The only real problem is getting these temporarily unemployed people an education and a new job. That's not a very big problem, as markets tend to make work when work is available. For instance, where did all the factory workers come from at the start of the industrial revolution? Everyone was working before then, presumably, as there was no such thing as welfare from the government. The workers came from industries that were torn down by the industrial revolution. We don't have cotton pickers anymore. We don't plow by hand. We don't have many of the menial labour jobs we had a hundred years ago, yet unemployment is less than 10% in Canada. The market equalized itself.
Where can these cashiers go? Perhaps preparing food. I wonder if we could start seeing more healthy restaurants that are more closely approaching the true cost of food at a grocery store. Since it costs less to have the store open, since the cash is automated, one could easily see that there would be more money available for food preparation.
The market will find a place for these workers, and everyone on average will see a net benefit from getting rid of non-producing jobs.
You're being optimistic and I hope you'll be right.
The big question is if we will be able to adapt fast enough, without erasing ourselves in a nuclear war or such.
Robots are just a different ballgame than the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was mostly confined to the production-sector. A modern machine could replace a hundred workers with one. Robots on the other hand could very well erase entire industries, reaching far into the service-sector.
What do you do with hundreds of millions of humans who suddenly are not needed for productive work anymore?
From the article, it seems that he was as prescient as in most other cases.