Quote:
Originally Posted by afterburn 549
It is all KNEE JERK !
The water wheels were going to replace people and horses, and we all die.
Engines would replace horses and people we all die
Cars replace horses and we all die.
Steam engines replace water wheels and horses and people and we all die
Diesel engine will replace all the above and..... we all ..die
Robots will replace humans and we will ..never mind, the earth would thrive and not ever miss us.
|
This is the logical "safe space" that people like to crawl into when this topic comes up, although the examples you cited are a little bit wacky and don't bear out the normal storylines of automation.
Cars did indeed replace horses; where are all the horses now? Apart from some throwback communities (eg the Amish) and the 3rd world, horses are now just expensive pets.
The industrial revolution created zillions of jobs, which because automated, and everyone migrated to the service sector; now those jobs are being automated.
What helped stave off our impending doom was war: WWI and WWII, and to a much lesser extend, the cold-war era proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam), removed millions of workers from the labor pool. If you factor in the lack of population growth, that's
billions of potential workers eliminated.
The digital revolution created zillions of jobs, and now a lot of those are being automated. When I started back in the early 90's, it took a lot of sysadmins to keep an operation going. I landed a sysadmin job @ HP in the late 90's, part of a team of 12 sysadmins for a data center with about 300 machines. When I left that position in 2013, I was the only guy left, managing 2500 machines. As the OS's and hardware have improved, it takes fewer resources to manage them. 85% of my environment was virtual - there was no physical hardware to provision or take care of. I had scripts that could bring up 100 fully-functional servers in 10 minutes, and take them offline just as quickly.
"Ok, so what about the people to build and program those machines?" I predict that it won't be long until the HP's, Dell's, IBM's, etc will be replaced by Chinese and Indian companies. American companies gladly outsourced it all to increase profits, but in essence trained their competition. We have American CEO's and 3rd-world developers; there is nothing - NOTHING - preventing the 3rd-worlders from rising up and replacing the American companies wholesale.
One of the dumbest things I've heard recently was on one of the right-leaning talk radio shows. There was some investor guy talking about how jobs had changed, and he cited the demise of travel agents and the rise of app developers: "What we need to do is re-train the travel agents to be app developers"