A Future Without Jobs

[GH85Carrera]

For sure there will always be jobs in food production. Even if it is growing yeast and adding flavors and textures.

That and making guns and ammo and weapons of war.

Until true artificial intelligence arrives people will need to preform a lot of tasks that robots and machines simply can't accomplish.

[sc_rufctr]

True AI is decades away if ever. The more we learn about it the harder the problems are to overcome.

What I mean by true AI is a computer that is equal to or better than the human brain.
Smart or what a lot people refer to as AI is no were near the human brains capacity for learning and understanding.

[911michael]

A perspective on the future of AI from 2015 -

AI revolution, pt 1

AI revolution, pt 2

and from yesterday -

AI Deep Learning

[JD159]

Originally Posted by afterburn 549

LOL
Would that be communism or socialism ?

It might be necessary. Don't worry, I'm sure you won't be around.

[island911]

What's going to happen when AI (or ASI) says something politically incorrect?

What if, for example, it concludes that man's contribution to the carbon cycle is equivalent to fish pissing in the ocean? Or, what if it said ...

Point is, AI is a machine created and cared for by man. Which means that the machines need to support the goals of men, else, douche.

[JD159]

Did something break this thread?

nm. works now

[widebody911]

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"

[Tervuren]

A working male can currently support a family off 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and have excess for retirement, accomplished with little home economy by other family members.

It used to be 12hr days, and 6 days a week, with a large amount of home economy accomplished by other family members.

All our tech, instead of having less working people; has resulted in less working hours. 72-40

Working three days a week to maintain current life style could be the future, then two, etc.

[JavaBrewer]

Originally Posted by widebody911

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"

Lots of tools out there that facilitate application development (coding). I think the hard part is story boarding the app correctly and coming up with a slick UI. App development as we know it today will follow travel agents tomorrow or the day after.

What sort of jobs do not lend to out sourcing or automation? IMO we are going to need plumbers, electricians, builders, and other skilled labor jobs for a long time.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by Tervuren

It used to be 12hr days, and 6 days a week, with a large amount of home economy accomplished by other family members.

All our tech, instead of having less working people; has resulted in less working hours. 72-40

No, it was because of those unions and workplace regulations; the same damn unions that are depriving children of gainful employment and making them go to those damn liberal schools instead of working in the factories as soon as they could walk.

Working three days a week to maintain current life style could be the future, then two, etc.

LOL - no. As productivity increase, you're simply required to produce more, not work less. In my example above, I could extrapolate that my productivity increases would entitle me to work 30 minutes a day (hyperbole - I didn't bother doing the math) for the same paycheck. I do automate my tasks when I can, but I'm still expected to warm a chair for 8 hours. In my last job, I even automated my interactions with the ticketing system (Remedy) and added times, so that someone looking at my ticket history would infer that I was working and closing tickets all day, when in reality it was a script that read the ticket, parsed the work, did the work, and closed the ticket - all without my intervention.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by JavaBrewer

Lots of tools out there that facilitate application development (coding). I think the hard part is story boarding the app correctly and coming up with a slick UI. App development as we know it today will follow travel agents tomorrow or the day after.

Exactly. There are loads of libraries and packages to take all the drudgery out of coding. Kids today have no idea what fopen(), malloc() or XtAppInitialize() are.

[74-911]

Originally Posted by widebody911

Exactly. There are loads of libraries and packages to take all the drudgery out of coding. Kids today have no idea what fopen(), malloc() or XtAppInitialize() are.

Actually, I don't know what the above commands are either but I can (or used to could anyway) write a binary search routine or Julian date conversion routine. Anyone but us old dinosaurs ever use the vi editor ?? -rwxrwxrwx

[Jim Richards]

Originally Posted by widebody911

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"

I thought this article was interesting. It's good to see that people in an area hit by a dying-out economy try to adapt with new, modern skills.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/2017-03-13/tech-companies-look-to-reinvent-eastern-kentucky-workforce

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by Jim Richards

I thought this article was interesting. It's good to see that people in an area hit by a dying-out economy try to adapt with new, modern skills.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/2017-03-13/tech-companies-look-to-reinvent-eastern-kentucky-workforce

But when Interapt, a Louisville-based software company, offered a training program in eastern Kentucky with the help of a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission, Crowl was one of 800 people to apply, 50 to be accepted and 35 to graduate. Now he's developing mobile apps as an intern in Interapt's eastern Kentucky office.

While that's a great success story, that formula will have to be repeated several hundred thousand times. However, the inherent risk of betting on software jobs to save the day is that they're very easy to offshore. I'm willing to bet they've already got some H1's if not offshore operations. This specific Cinderella story (for 1 Cinderella out of 800 stepsisters) was dependent on a grant; the software company probably wouldn't have done this without said grant money. Translation: the company was bribed into training an American app developer. This guy was 29, with some education; how many of his older, less-educated peers are out there, and what options are available for them?

[Jim Richards]

Absolutely. This is only baby steps.

[tadd]

Actually universal income has been endorsed by very conservative economic thinkers like Hayek.

It is actually an interesting argument. With a basic income provided for, the hysteresis for the worker is minimized, so the worker can change jobs easily. This automatically puts balance between the employer and employee. Many of the laws and regulatory agencies we have are to attempt to address the balance between employer and employee (avoiding servitude).

From the second link:
Quote: "But even if market competition is often a good check against private dominance, there is no good economic reason to believe that it will always be sufficient. Can we really dismiss the possibility that hard economic times, combined with an excess supply of labor and a small number of employers, will leave some employers with considerable market power over their workers?"

Isn't this exactly what is being questioned by the OP?

As for government, with a basic income, OSHA could go away. If the employer is exposing you to chemicals and not telling you, you can up and leave cause you can still pay your bills. Same with hours worked or other employee grievances like sexual harassment. All of those agencies and laws can be abandoned. So the argument is basic income would be way cheaper and facilitate the natural market forces.

https://medium.com/bull-market/friedrich-hayek-supported-a-guaranteed-minimum-income-ad321f54f8b2

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/why-did-hayek-support-basic-income

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

As technology changes there are always new jobs created. I really can't see it ever becoming a problem for the remainder of my working life. (I'm 52)

This! Someone will be needed to design, build, and maintain all this new technology!

Remember the paperless office? How is that going?

When my dad got a computer he was dumbfounded about how weekly he had problems... I would tell him "dad, if computers were infallible I wouldn't have a job!"

[Tervuren]

Originally Posted by widebody911

No, it was because of those unions and workplace regulations; the same damn unions that are depriving children of gainful employment and making them go to those damn liberal schools instead of working in the factories as soon as they could walk.

Eh? I started with a reference with a time point before the advent of factories. Hint, look up what home economy means.

Originally Posted by Tervuren

It used to be 12hr days, and 6 days a week, with a large amount of home economy accomplished by other family members.

Obviously, a large amount of home economy cannot be accomplished if the wife and kids are working at a factory...I was referencing pre-factory days in a mostly slave free culture.

[widebody911]

Originally Posted by scottmandue

This! Someone will be needed to design, build, and maintain all this new technology!

As the technology improves, not only are fewer and fewer people needed to design/build/maintain, but increasingly those positions exist in lower-cost geographies.

Remember the paperless office? How is that going?

Quite well. I honestly can't recall the last time I actually had to print something in the office. All of my HR and payroll stuff is done electronically.

[Bob Kontak]

Originally Posted by Tervuren

Obviously, a large amount of home economy cannot be accomplished if the wife and kids are working at a factory...I was referencing pre-factory days in a mostly slave free culture.

Applies to post factory days as well. Maybe when Henry Ford first paid the workers a robust amount of money could have been the start of "comfortably supporting" a family.

With respect to your original post about wages rising. That six day week was also married to a tiny house without plumbing or insulation. No car or at best a single jalopy when approaching the 60's. It was a spartan lifestyle.