What jobs will employ the masses?

[Channman 2]

quade

The true robot threat to humanity isn't some Skynet terminator judgement day, but the obsolescence of even the lowest wage worker. There will be a one percent world served by robots and a 99 percent unemployment rate.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/this-robot-barista-promises-a-perfect-cup-of-coffee/280658/

What jobs will employ the masses?

Government, Government and OH...Government

[kelpdiver 2]

billvon

>You continue to repeat that as if it's some sort of given. It's not.

It's a pretty basic principle of economics.

If you reduce overall hours worked per week (i.e. reduce labor across the board) AND you improve productivity per hour so the reduced number of employees produce the same amount - then the total paid to labor does not need to change to have no impact on a business.

What you're really describing here is a basic principle called PROFIT. Increasing productivity increases profit. How much is given to the employees in wage increases is determined in large part by how replaceable are they, and how much their sense of work satisfaction affects their output. In N Out found that paying their people more than minimum wage did pay off. Other fast food places, otoh, are content to optimize the process but pay minimum wage and replace people often.

A key difference between In N Out and McDonald's is that the first one is still a private company. McDonald's, otoh, has an obligation to its shareholders that outweighs its burger slingers.

Quote

This is going to lead to something of a sea change because right now the societal norm is that you work 40 hours a week. In places with very high productivity (like Norway and France) this has already led to the reduction of hours worked, since people simply don't need to work as hard to generate the same output, and thus can make more money while working fewer hours. Here in the US our culture is tied to the 40 hour work week, and that will take a while to change. But it will as wages continue to increase; people will simply be able to afford to work less.

This logic works for the self employed, or the salesman that is paid on commission. Doesn't work if you're a cog.

These changes get driven by regulation. Labor was very aggressive in France at driving that down towards 30 because it would mean more jobs to do the same work. Not good economic thinking, but serving their goal.

[lurch 0]

Early steam engines, man. Early ones.
Early steam engines: James Watt, late 18th century, 1781
Airliners with autopilot and ILS: Fully matured technology. Mid-late 20th century, early 21'st...
Dunno exactly when those features became available and can't be arsed to look it up, but call it somewhere between late 60's or 70's at the earliest. Probably closer to mid-80's to mid-90's.

More like 200 years. Roughly the scale I was driving at.
Anyway the point was, long long time.

-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[turtlespeed 220]

lurch

Early steam engines, man. Early ones.
Early steam engines: James Watt, late 18th century, 1781
Airliners with autopilot and ILS: Fully matured technology. Mid-late 20th century, early 21'st...
Dunno exactly when those features became available and can't be arsed to look it up, but call it somewhere between late 60's or 70's at the earliest. Probably closer to mid-80's to mid-90's.

More like 200 years. Roughly the scale I was driving at.
Anyway the point was, long long time.

-B

Duh . . . lobbyists!

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[kallend 2,027]

lurch

Early steam engines, man. Early ones.
Early steam engines: James Watt, late 18th century, 1781
Airliners with autopilot and ILS: Fully matured technology. Mid-late 20th century, early 21'st...
Dunno exactly when those features became available and can't be arsed to look it up, but call it somewhere between late 60's or 70's at the earliest. Probably closer to mid-80's to mid-90's.

More like 200 years. Roughly the scale I was driving at.
Anyway the point was, long long time.

-B

As the accuracy and reliability of the ground based ILS localiser was increased on a step by step basis, it was permissible to leave the roll channel engaged longer and longer, until in fact the aircraft had ceased to be airborne, and a fully automatic landing had in fact been completed. The first such landing in a BEA Trident was achieved at RAE Bedford (by then home of BLEU) in March 1964. The first on a commercial flight with passengers aboard was achieved on flight BE 343 on 10 June 1965, with a Trident 1 G-ARPR, from Paris to Heathrow with Captains Eric Poole and Frank Ormonroyd.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[quade 4]

lurch

More like 200 years. Roughly the scale I was driving at.

I dunno. Not that a factor of 2 really changes anything here.

I look at how fast and far Boston Dynamic has come with something like Atlas and believe it's a hell of a lot closer than farther.

http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html

Is Atlas going to replace the auto mechanic who does 99% of basic service? Probably not this year, but I have no doubt it's an eventuality. My guess is Atlas or something like him would be more than capable of mounting tires and changing oil in a very short amount of time.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[wolfriverjoe 1,523]

quade

...Is Atlas going to replace the auto mechanic who does 99% of basic service? Probably not this year, but I have no doubt it's an eventuality. My guess is Atlas or something like him would be more than capable of mounting tires and changing oil in a very short amount of time.

Perhaps, but there is a huge difference between a basic "remove and replace" like tires or oil and figuring out where the "funny noise in the transmission" is coming from.

Tire changing would be:

Lift car and secure wheel; remove lugnuts; remove wheel (use same cradle/grab arms that were used to secure it); place tire on changer; deflate and remove tire from wheel; replace tire on wheel and reinflate; balance wheel; replace wheel on hub; replace lugnuts; lower car.

I would guess that an industrial robot could be made to perform that task using currently available technology.

It just doesn't make sense to do it because even the biggest tire shops couldn't justify the cost.

But reaching the point where the robots are doing diagnostic work is a long, long way off. It's not the ability to manipulate stuff, it's the AI necessary to choose the correct answer out of a multitude of options. People can ignore the obviously incorrect but computers have to consider each possibility. The chess playing programs had this problem. They have brought that a long way, but there's a lot further to go.

"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

[quade 4]

wolfriverjoe

But reaching the point where the robots are doing diagnostic work is a long, long way off. It's not the ability to manipulate stuff, it's the AI necessary to choose the correct answer out of a multitude of options. People can ignore the obviously incorrect but computers have to consider each possibility. The chess playing programs had this problem. They have brought that a long way, but there's a lot further to go.

Except it's being done right now on something FAR more complex than any car; humans.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/12/ai-system-diagnoses-illnesses-better-than-doctors/

When it comes to diagnosis, AI is going to far outstrip humans in most cases in the near future. It's only the freak cases where human diagnosis is going to have an advantage, but for typical things, AI is going to "win" every time.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[lurch 0]

I always find it amusing, the gap between what people think machines are capable of or could be, and the reality.

The robots we DO have really ARE amazing... and I love working on them. But the act and process of diagnosing and repairing them is far, far more complex than the robot itself. It is so analog in nature that having one you could sic on another and say "fix that", and it goes over, pokes at the dead one, evaluates its function, identifies the failure, and acts to fix it, whether that be dusting off a sensor, or tearing down the z-axis pinion drive, replacing the +limit sensor, and getting the lines back into the cable trays all buttoned up... or like I said, finding and fixing a leaky pipe, say, a coolant line, just isn't happening.

It'd require full-blown sentient or near-sentient human-grade AI, bare minimum. Something so smart, and so fully immersed in reality and capable of coping with reality that it knows a cracked pipe or stripped threads when it sees them. It'd need hearing... to hear the sound of compressed air that is the only sign of the failed air cylinder and the reason that cylinder just doesn't push things as hard as it should. Mechanicing robots is subtle. More, it'd need to be able to know the other machines so well that it could recognize a sporadic failure of X stage to function as possibly caused by said erratic sensors, or loose brackets or whatever, and investigate until it finds exactly what is interfering with the other robot, whether thats a failure or just plastic shavings accumulating in the wrong place.

In any case, by the time we do have human-grade AI, we'll be so far along the technological singularity that being out of a job would be the least of our problems. When we hit full human-grade AI, something that really passes the Turing test, (ability to hold a conversation so that you can't tell if its a machine or a human you're talking to) the acceleration of the singularity event immediately goes critical-mass chain reaction nuclear and blows everything we know about technology out of the water.
Fast.
Machine as smart as a human: ask it to design its own replacement.
Its own replacement, designed by a machine, is 200x as smart as IT is. It, in turn sets off several generations worth of this. In a handful of generations we'd have machine intelligence so far beyond our own that we will never, ever understand it or catch up. It took 20 years to go from 60 mhz 486's and early Pentiums to today's quadcore 3.6 gHz stuff. An AI capable of designing chips that it then uses to think harder to design better ones, and write the software for itself to use them, could do that entire 20 year sequence virtually overnight, and COULD soon learn to cope with reality well enough to spot things like stuck bearings and failed sensors. From there designing a physical shell, a robot, for it to use to fix things... not so far. More, let it design the robots it'll be fixing in the first place, design it for IT to fix, not built around human engineering, and we're just weeks or months away from The Matrix.

We'd be looking at technology so advanced we couldn't recognize it and literally could not be educated to. Materials technology, designed by machines, used to make parts and functions dependent on phenomena we can't and don't know anything about... the ultimate Von Neumann machine, machines able to make more of themselves, upgrading with every generation... its already happening... how was the last generation of processors designed? On computers, running on earlier processors. Its just that we are still the brains behind it all, and it is all still dependent on us. When it gets as smart as us, it won't be anymore. We'll make ourselves obsolete.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
Good news is, we're still so far away from machine sentience and all that it will bring, that we can't even see it on the horizon. Machines are really good at following instructions but making one that can actually think, is so hard that the smartest stuff we've got now can still be outsmarted by the average cockroach.
I'll have a job for awhile yet.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[kallend 2,027]

Predicting the future of technology is fraught with difficulty. My 2012 iPhone is rather more capable than Capt. James T. Kirk's "communicator", but no-one went on a mission to Jupiter in 2001.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[turtlespeed 220]

kallend

Predicting the future of technology is fraught with difficulty. My 2012 iPhone is rather more capable than Capt. James T. Kirk's "communicator", but no-one went on a mission to Jupiter in 2001.

That you know of.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[ryoder 1,590]

kallend

Predicting the future of technology is fraught with difficulty. My 2012 iPhone is rather more capable than Capt. James T. Kirk's "communicator", but no-one went on a mission to Jupiter in 2001.

Well, "2001" was filmed way back in 1968, before predictions had been perfected.
I am confident that in 6 years, we will have flying cars, (aka "spinners"), off-world colonies, and replicants indistiguishable from humans.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[turtlespeed 220]

ryoder

***
Predicting the future of technology is fraught with difficulty. My 2012 iPhone is rather more capable than Capt. James T. Kirk's "communicator", but no-one went on a mission to Jupiter in 2001.

Well, "2001" was filmed way back in 1968, before predictions had been perfected.
I am confident that in 6 years, we will have flying cars, (aka "spinners"), off-world colonies, and replicants indistiguishable from humans.

What about hovering skateboards and Mr. Fusion

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[chedlin 0]

Lurch, I think you are failing to consider potential breakthroughs in sensor and diagnostic capability on robotic repair of cars.

How does a good mechanic diagnose a ball joint? Sound. Picture, pressure. We can now decode speech with 90+% accuracy using only the processor on a phone. How far are we from decoding these other sounds? Computer vision is coming a long ways.. Certainly this wouldn't work built into every car, but we are talking about robots to fix robots, they don't have to be built into the device they are fixing.

I'm not saying we are there, but industries that have been the same for decades can be changed quite suddenly and dramatically with the right innovation.

[kelpdiver 2]

when I think of robots fixing themselves, I think it starts with modular parts, exemplified in Wall-E. Problem with an arm - replace the entire assembly. And robots should be able to build these assemblies. You may still want a human to look at, perhaps even repair the bad parts for diagnostics or conservation, but there's minimal downtime for the robot.

As you iterate, you identify the most common failures and where possible you give the robot the ability to fix them.

[quade 4]

The $35,000 stock boy robot.

http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/zero-moment/say-hello-ubr-1-one-armed-agent-robot-economy?dom=tw&src=SOC

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[turtlespeed 220]

Maybe the masses should learn web page development.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[CanuckInUSA 0]

turtlespeed

Maybe the masses should learn web page development.

Actually the masses need to begin thinking for themselves, thinking of "how can I survive in this ever changing world", instead of relying on some old out dated "we can all work as a collective in the same industries" way of thinking. The world is evolving and those who are unwilling to adapt, unwilling to be responsible for their own destiny, will be left behind.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[quade 4]

CanuckInUSA

The world is evolving and those who are unwilling to adapt, unwilling to be responsible for their own destiny, will be left behind.

Very macho thing to say. Completely ignores quite a few realities of life.

My entire point here is minimum wage jobs are already the refuge of those types of people. People, who quite possibly through no fault of their own simply find themselves with below average lives. What happens to the people who were simply born with slightly below average IQs who will never be web page designers or robot technicians?

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[ryoder 1,590]

quade

What happens to the people who were simply born with slightly below average IQs who will never be web page designers or robot technicians?

I expect we will continue to elect them to public office.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[CanuckInUSA 0]

Sorry I can not help you cure yourself of your Marxist views of how the world should operate. Only you can cure yourself of this disorder. Life is not fair. It never has been fair and it never will be fair.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[turtlespeed 220]

CanuckInUSA

Sorry I can not help you cure yourself of your Marxist views of how the world should operate. Only you can cure yourself of this disorder. Life is not fair. It never has been fair and it never will be fair.

That's not fair!

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[quade 4]

CanuckInUSA

Sorry I can not help you cure yourself of your Marxist views of how the world should operate. Only you can cure yourself of this disorder. Life is not fair. It never has been fair and it never will be fair.

What fantasy world do you live in that makes you think this thread has anything to do with how I think the world "should" operate? Am I suggesting some sort of subsidy for these people? No. I'm asking what JOBS they will perform or if there will even be any jobs at all? I'm not asking if life is fair; I already know it isn't. What I'm asking is when 50% of the country's workforce is replaced by robots, how WILL society deal with it?

It's you and people like you who seems perfectly fine with the concept of "fuck 'em," but you're not seeing the bigger picture because without jobs, these people will be living on government subsidy which will only mean higher taxes. It's, in fact, you and people who aren't willing to even discuss the idea that are ultimately going to create an entire socialized and subsidized class.

I'm not arguing FOR it. I'm asking what are we going to do ABOUT it.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[CanuckInUSA 0]

There is no doubt that Western societies are at a crossroad right now and the direction we take will influence our future. Now if you want possible solutions, here goes:

1) Create a business friendly environment ... but this is NOT enough.

2) More importantly teach children that they need to be self reliant, and teach them problem solving and entrepreneurial skills which helps them think outside of the box. This way instead of going through life thinking someone else needs to create a job for them, they will go through life thinking of the next idea towards creating new opportunities for themselves and in turn they end up creating jobs for themselves.

It all starts at home, you know the family. You know where parents teach their children how to be respectful self reliant individuals. Then they can use academia to enhance these skills. But instead the family unit is dissolving, and we instead have people calling for government to do the role that parents should have done. Of course some people will always fall through the cracks. Some people will either be physically or mentally disabled and for these people, we do need some sort of safety net. But not the masses.

But these points have been brought up numerous times in the past and continually rejected from Marxists such as yourself. Until you cure yourself of this disorder, you will always think the solution is "what do we do to make sure the masses are all economically equal".

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[quade 4]

CanuckInUSA

... Marxists such as yourself.

Bite me. Seriously.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver