Instead of Slowing Down Innovation To Protect Few People, Policymakers Should Focus On Helping Displaced Workers Transition Into New Jobs, ITIF Suggests (itif.org) 160
A recently published report by Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) argues that rather than slow
down change to protect a small number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help workers transition easily into new jobs and new occupations [PDF]. From a report: There has been growing speculation that a coming wave of innovation -- indeed, a tsunami -- powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, will disrupt labor markets, generate mass unemployment, and shift the few jobs that remain into the insecure "gig economy." Kneejerk "solutions" from such technology Cassandras include ideas like taxing "robots" and implementing universal basic income for everyone, employed or not. The first would slow needed productivity growth, employed or not; the second would reduce worker opportunity.
The truth is these technologies will provide a desperately needed boost to productivity and wages, but that does not mean no one will be hurt. There are always winners and losers in major economic transitions. But rather than slow down change to protect a modest number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations. Improving policies to help workers navigate what is likely to be a more turbulent labor market is not something that should be done just out of fairness, although it is certainly fair to help workers who are either hurt by change or at risk of being hurt. But absent better labor market transition policies, there is a real risk that public and elite sentiment will turn staunchly against technological change, seeing it as fundamentally destructive and unfair.
The truth is these technologies will provide a desperately needed boost to productivity and wages, but that does not mean no one will be hurt. There are always winners and losers in major economic transitions. But rather than slow down change to protect a modest number of workers at the expense of the vast majority, policymakers should focus on doing significantly more to help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations. Improving policies to help workers navigate what is likely to be a more turbulent labor market is not something that should be done just out of fairness, although it is certainly fair to help workers who are either hurt by change or at risk of being hurt. But absent better labor market transition policies, there is a real risk that public and elite sentiment will turn staunchly against technological change, seeing it as fundamentally destructive and unfair.
Leave it to the policymakers... (Score:5, Informative)
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I know 4 local places that are looking for a machinists. They can not seem to find one. Send them to Dallas please.
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I know 4 local places that are looking for a machinists. They can not seem to find one. Send them to Dallas please.
That was back in the Bush era. I'm sure those guys are all working somewhere now.
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Tell those 4 places to look in the oil patch. But unless they're willing to drop $90k-150k/year, they're not going to pull those machinists away. The big idea has been for the last ~30 years to push kids not to go into trades, that university was the better choice for everyone(it isn't). Now there's millions of jobs open in trades(est. 8m empty FT trade jobs), but a glut of people who can't find work because they spent $250k on a degree that gets them nothing with no real world skills. On top of that the
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A university degree represents flexibility. To swap from one to another degree often just means changing a few subjects and post graduation getting multiple degrees just means adding a few subjects. A trade is lock in. Don't ever pretend that IQ does not make a difference, there is a world of difference between 140 and 100 and that 100 will never get a real degree just an easy to pass one for a piece of paper. Some people cruise through degrees studying the night before for exams and some fail no matter how
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Trades tend to be a trap in times of glut.
Depends on where you are. Even at that, your average electrician is going to have an easier job finding work then you are. On top of that, your average university degree doesn't represent flexibility. It represents your ability to return accumulated and learned knowledge that's been handed to you.
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What we need is grants or stipends so people forced to change jobs in mid life can afford to live through the apprenticeship. To anyone saying people should just tighten their belts and cram 3 families into a single family dwelling (most often someone making well over the median in a job that isn't threatened), I say "after you".
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What we need is grants or stipends so people forced to change jobs in mid life can afford to live through the apprenticeship. To anyone saying people should just tighten their belts and cram 3 families into a single family dwelling (most often someone making well over the median in a job that isn't threatened), I say "after you".
Sure, if you can get the government to pony up the money on that instead of say spending it on illegals, I'd be right with you. Most western governments don't have their priorities straight on things like this. Going by your UID, you're likely old enough to remember the hyperinflation crash of the 80's. We've already been there in terms of cramming families into a single family dwelling. You simply missed the part where things have been so good over the last 35 years that even the poorest today are vast
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People should pay for their own apprenticeships. If they were awesome self-employed contractors like cayenne8 they could claim it as an expense and get a tax rebate.
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Lots of people would probably like to get trained as machinists so they could get those jobs.
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Wtf Am I going to wake up tomorrow morning (Score:2)
and find AI bots crawling up my leg??? What's the *real* agenda behind telling everyone how the AI bots are going to kill all the jobs when I can't find an AI to do my effing household chores, or drive me somewhere, or cook a meal for me??
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Shockingly enough, when people make predictions about the future, they are talking about things that have not happened yet.
Re: Wtf Am I going to wake up tomorrow morning (Score:2)
That's my point exactly. I just don't see robots doing the jobs I need done for quite a long time. The best walking robot there is still doesn't have any working fingers worth a damn. This ranks up there with flying cars as plausible.
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The roobts that will be taking a lot of jobs don't exist in meat-space; they are things like Amazon's software, medical diagnosis software, design assistance software, etc. These things are in some cases human labor multipliers, in other cases they are outright replacements. When a mechanical engineer using CAD software can now do the job of 8 engineers, there are now 7 engineers that are hitting the bricks. Same with software, but worse because software is going to write itself in the not-to-distant fut
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It won't be crawling up your leg, in fact you probably won't notice at all.
You won't notice when the squawk box at your local drive-thru takes your order by AI.
You won't notice the automated pickers that replace farm workers to pick your produce.
You won't notice the automated tractors and sprayers that grow your food.
You won't notice that all of the people between submitting a mortgage application and getting the check at closing have been eliminated.
You'll remember your first ride in a driverless car. You
What jobs? (Score:3)
That change let US money move from normal nations to Communist China.
When workers in China get to expensive try Indonesia, Laos.
At some point robots in very low wage nations become the new way to ensure quality and a good return for the shareholders and owners.
The jobs went in the 1970's and 1980's. The robots and AI are just going to make lower cost production lines in a few very low cost nations.
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Unskilled manufacturing jobs went the way of farm labor decades ago. That's not what anyone is talking about.
This discussion is about all the service jobs that replaced all the manufacturing jobs that replaced all the farm jobs. Service jobs are gradually being automated now, so now what?
There are plenty of skilled blue collar jobs going hungry right now, so training would have huge benefits. But not everyone can be trained for the remaining jobs, so what about them? It's not obvious what to do.
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Policy makers (Score:2)
The root of our problems is that policy makers are not equipped to do their jobs effectively.
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It's not a matter of policy makers not being "equipped" to do their jobs effectively.
It's a matter of policy becoming corrupted by money. We have a corporate kleptocracy which dictates policy... and the policies they want is low taxes, no social programs (no wasteful spending on health, education, training, housing, etc.), and sending jobs to cheap "shithole" countries.
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It's not a matter of policy makers not being "equipped" to do their jobs effectively.
It's a matter of policy becoming corrupted by money.
By equipped I don't mean they need to wear a different hat. I mean they lack the experiences and education to understand science, ethics, or sociology. We have people selecting our leaders, and those leaders are making uninformed decisions. We need better people, either that's different people or the current people need to improve a hell of a lot.
I propose that everyone we elect have some meaningful life experiences. Examples include, but limited to:
* Spent 3 months in a state prison. (might not be so quick
Transition to what? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in this postulated future, we have general purpose AI and highly advanced robotics.
What, exactly, do all those humans transition to?
The agricultural revolution greatly reduced the number of people working in the fields. Those people could transition to jobs in manufacturing, and the industrial revolution happened.
Computers become cheap, widespread and widely-integrated into businesses. Many of the displaced workers are able to transition to jobs supporting information technologies in many ways.
General purpose AI and advanced robotics are able to replace everything a human can do. So what jobs do the humans transition to? Build robots? No, that can be done by robots and AI in this scenario, so it's not going to be able to support the displaced humans.
That's the glaring hole in this paper: the assumption that there will be some job for the human to transition to.
Unless they expect us to all be fashion models:
But they appear to significantly overstate this number by including occupations that have little
chance of automation, such as fashion modeling
Btw, this is insanely stupid of a claim. Fashion designers want a particular size and shape of model and for her to walk down a particular stretch of runway at a particular pace and be as non-human as possible - the point is to show off the clothes......golly, that sounds like a fantastic opportunity for robotics.
But that's OK, because rich people will still have money to spend!
The 4th industrialists’ third mistake is that this “nowhere left to run” argument is absurd
on its face because global productivity could increase by a factor of 50 without people
running out of things to buy. Just look at what people with higher incomes spend their
money on: nicer vacations, larger homes, luxury items, more restaurant meals, more
entertainment like concerts and plays, and more personal services
It doesn't seem to occur to them that the poor folks still gotta eat. And if they have no food to eat, they will eat the rich.
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General purpose AI and advanced robotics are able to replace everything a human can do.
I'm going to stop you right there because your assumption is completely and totally incorrect. So-called 'AI' as it currently exists, and for the forseeable future, is not in any way, shape, or form equivalent to a human being. We have NO IDEA how human brains are self-aware, capable of actual 'thought', capable of having a 'personality', etcetera, and so-called 'artificial intelligence' is not capable of these things; there is no 'mind' inside that box, it's just a computer running software. Calm down, tak
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you are missing the point that most jobs don't require a human. we only used humans because there was no other valid option.
not a questions of intelligence or humanity.
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Or because humans pay premium for humans. As an example, human phone operators seem to have made some what of a comeback because automated voice messaging is unpopular and annoying.
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It's unpopular and annoying because it uses sucky old voice recognition tech. If it were replaced with, say, Siri levels of enunciation and comprehension, then many people wouldn't even realize it wasn't a human.
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>> As an example, human phone operators seem to have made some what of a comeback because automated voice messaging is unpopular and annoying. ...for the time being. There are several companies which are doing interactive voice, and it's pretty wonderful how much they've improved the state of the art. It doesn't mean that everything is going to work through IVR going forward but for information gathering and some other basic tasks requiring a small medicum of intelligence - by which I mean workable h
Re:Transition to what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to stop you right there because your assumption is completely and totally incorrect. So-called 'AI' as it currently exists
So....you were unable to actually read the first sentence of the post?
Here, I'll put it in this one. Maybe you'll read it this time: "So, in this postulated future, we have general purpose AI and highly advanced robotics."
AI as it currently exists is not the measure. AI as it exists in this future is.
We have NO IDEA how human brains are self-aware, capable of actual 'thought', capable of having a 'personality', etcetera
How are any of those relevant to doing a job?
I write computer software. A personality is not required to do that, as evidenced by many people I've worked with over the years. Nor is self-awareness.
You don't need a robot you can chat with about Nietzsche for the robot to displace human labor.
but new types always spring up to take their place
In all previous times new technology massively disrupted employment, that new technology was not suitable for some other field. Advances in farming technology could not be applied to manufacturing.
That isn't true with actual general-purpose AI and advanced robotics. They can be applied to everything we currently pay humans to do. Unless you are going to claim we will all get paid to discuss Nietzsche.
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There is no reason currently to believe there will EVER be such a think as what you call 'general AI' (i.e like something out of I, Robot) because we have no bloody idea how a human brain does that
Again, a personality is not required to displace human labor. You don't need I, Robot.
You just need AI advanced enough to do the labor while being able to handle the exceptions in the workflow like a human can. That does not require consciousness.
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It doesn't need to displace all human labour. If a call handling system can deal with even half of queries and flip the other half to a carbon unit you've got 50% unemployment. What if it can deal with 9/10?
Even the lower estimate is a huge system shock to an economy. Not exactly fun for the people involved too.
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Rick, despite your lavish use of all-caps words and bolding of text (combined at times even), jeff4747 made more logical statements that hang together and thus he wins the argument. I guess the lesson here is that yelling and raising your voice doesn't necessarily add up to a more cogent argument or a better thought process (does it ever?).
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Re: Transition to what? (Score:2)
There's every reason to believe it's coming and soon. Subjective experience of consciousness is irrelevant, you don't even know if your closest friend even has it. You are a physical system in correlation with your environment, unfolding in accordance with certain rules, which can be emulated for purposes of information processing and action. This is scientific truth.
Old people can point to this as the pinnacle of objectification and materialism, but these are the driving forces in our society, cons
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There is no reason currently to believe there will EVER be such a think as what you call 'general AI'
When I was a child, the most powerful thing I could get my hands on was an atari 2600. Now, every morning starts with me mumbling "Alexa, what's in the news?". The child version of me had no "reason currently" to believe that would ever be possible.
General AI might not be easy, it may require the type of computing power that seems fanciful now, but will be ubiquitous in 15 years, but it is coming. It won't be a human, it won't be self aware, but it will be able to understand what you mean by "mop the flo
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I'm going to stop you right there because your assumption is completely and totally incorrect. So-called 'AI' as it currently exists, and for the forseeable future, is not in any way, shape, or form equivalent to a human being. We have NO IDEA how human brains are self-aware, capable of actual 'thought', capable of having a 'personality', etcetera, and so-called 'artificial intelligence' is not capable of these things;
Well how many jobs want that in an employee? Most jobs just want you to be a cog in the machinery, do whatever you were trained to do. You may not realize it if you work in a creative industry, but there's no progress to being a taxi driver you just drive people around. McD served Big Macs last year and will serve Big Macs next year. A lot of manufacturing, maintenance, retail, shipping, construction, processing, support etc. have people doing the same tasks over and over. Even education, if you consider th
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Where will humans probably work? Service oriented jobs. Jobs that no matter the AI, people prefer people doing it and will pay for people to do it. Is my first guess. I don't know what industry will absorb displaced workers from general AI but I do know that there will always be a demand for human labor because humans will pay for human service. Even existing industry can be revolutionized and be top employers for a broad swath of people with varying skills, take Walmart. Not saying it is perfect but they w
Re:Transition to what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs that no matter the AI, people prefer people doing it and will pay for people to do it. Is my first guess
There are not enough people who can afford the premium over AI/Robotics.
10,000 personal assistant jobs can not make up for losing 10,000,000 other jobs. To make that work economically, the humans would have to be paid so much more than the AI/Robotics that the wealthy would choose more of the latter.
Even existing industry can be revolutionized and be top employers for a broad swath of people with varying skills, take Walmart. Not saying it is perfect but they were able to dominate the market though process, service, and reworking distribution. Amazon is another example one of the largest employers is spearheading AI development and automation.
You do realize the two examples you give of revolutionizing existing industry did that by greatly reducing the number of human employees required to do those jobs, right? Not exactly a good argument for those kinds of revolutions being able to absorb displaced human labor....
When has automation or industrialization ever led to wide spread poverty through any kind of increased productivity?
Actually, every single economic revolution.
The agricultural revolution was actually really bad for the displaced farm hands. It's not like they could immediately jump to factory jobs, since the factories did not exist yet. The large pool of idle poor were required as the "fuel" for the industrial revolution to start, which was rather unpleasant for those waiting in that pool.
It would be the Reign of Terror all over again because someone is better off.
That's kind of the point of having this discussion now.
For all of human history, "work" has equaled food and survival. From hunting and gathering to pulling ethernet cables. That's going to break down in the medium-term future because there is not going to be enough work for all the humans.
So, we either talk about it and figure out a way through the largest economic transition our species has ever had, or we ignore it. If we ignore it, the violence will be very bad.
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The world's last human burger flipper will be paid the minimum wage of $10,000/hr. However, $9,985 of that will be taken as taxes to pay all the unemployed former burger flippers.
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Every major leap in automation has been followed by several years of economic turmoil where people were displaced from their jobs but new jobs hadn't been created yet. It's easy to look at that as a simple curiosity when you're a well paid economist and not one of those people.
A novelty here is that some SKILLED labor is also on the chopping block.
I'm not so sure people will pay that much for human service, especially if they are feeling an economic pinch. Remember when gas stations used to offer full servi
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Every major leap in automation has been followed by several years of economic turmoil where people were displaced from their jobs but new jobs hadn't been created yet.
There's an argument to be made that it wasn't just economic turmoil that resulted from these leaps, but revolutions (1848, 1917) and wars (US Civil, WW1 and by extension WW2) as well. As you rightly say, it's easy to look at this with detached curiosity when you're not on the front lines of the upheaval. But eventually it turns bad, and when it turns bad, it turns VERY bad.
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These discussions always devolve into people talking past eash other, because they have differing discussions about the topic: are we talking post-Singularity here?
If we're talking about human-equivalent AI, then we're very quickly talking about AI vastly exceeding human-equivalent, and the best we can hope for is that we'll make great pets. Jobs will be the least of our worries.
If, OTOH, we're talking about the continued gradual increase in automation, then there's no reason to think there won't be new jo
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If there are no jobs left making food or simple cloths or basic shelter, that just leaves people with more time to produce social status symbols, entertainment, customization of robot-produced goods, and so on.
And those wouldn't be produced by AI/Robotics because........?
Also, you're talking about employing roughly 10 billion people. You can't employ all of them by customizing stuff for 10 million wealthy people. The price for those customization would be far too high, resulting in AI/Robotics doing it for the not-quite-super-wealthy, with a tiny fraction of that 10 billion being able to work for the super-wealthy.
the money will sort itself out.
Eventually.
Before it finishes sorting itself out, we could go through some extremely horrific times.
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And those wouldn't be produced by AI/Robotics because........?
Because we're explicitly not talking about human-equivalent AI. Or didn't you read the bit before what you quoted.
so, you're talking about employing roughly 10 billion people. You can't employ all of them by customizing stuff for 10 million wealthy people.
Of course not, you employ them by customizing stuff for 10 billion people. The economy is nothing more that what we make and do for one another.
How about we discuss this transition and plan for it instead of having to go through that violence?
Perhaps a 5-Year Plan? No economy was ever made better by central planning.
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If we're talking about human-equivalent AI
...
If, OTOH, we're talking about the continued gradual increase in automation
False dichotomy. We're likely looking at something in between - not human-equivalent, but good enough to do many of the things that humans now do. Not so good that it instantly puts everyone out of work, but good enough that new jobs don't come on line fast enough to replace a significant portion of those that are lost.
It does occur to them (Score:2)
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Btw, this is insanely stupid of a claim. Fashion designers want a particular size and shape of model and for her to walk down a particular stretch of runway at a particular pace and be as non-human as possible - the point is to show off the clothes......golly, that sounds like a fantastic opportunity for robotics.
It shows generally lackluster thinking. Have they not noticed that AI generated fake photos are passing for the real thing these days? They could just throw the clothes on a dummy and have the AI fill in a plausible model later.
If anything, that might be the easiest fill in given that after the crazy dieting and heroin use plus air brushing, many fashion photos are already on the edge of the uncanny valley.
As for the catwalk, Michael Jackson appeared on stage in holographic form after his death.
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Weird definition of 'oppurtunity' (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there are few opportunities for workers more valuable than the ability to freely tell employers to go fuck themselves, which a UBI would enable. Plus, if an employee can spend years looking for jobs, they can be much more selective.
The real downside to a UBI is that it reduces the power of employers, including the ones that fund the ITIF.
Same as another thread (Score:2)
Productivity not boosting wages (Score:5, Interesting)
Productivity has grown substantially since the 1970s but wages have remained stagnant.
I just don't believe anyone who tells me that MORE productivity growth is somehow a predictor for wage growth. Perhaps there is some mythical level of productivity growth that overwhelm's capital's ability to capture it all, but I kind of doubt it.
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Purchasing power has gone way up since the 70s. We're swimming in futuristic stuff that was not available at any price in the 70s. For example, bottom-of-the-line cars today blow away typical 70s cars for power, performance, reliability, and safety - but people will compare a typical car today with a typical car of the 70s as if they were equivalent. Compare purchasing power for equivalent functionality, not equivalent social signalling, and wages have risen considerably.
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Food is much cheaper, as a percentage of income than it was in the 70s. People like to buy fast food now, of course, but basic foodstuffs are cheap (not specialty hipster food of course). Basic housing is hard to compare, because location is the most important factor, but do note that in the 70s you averaged about 2 people per bedroom, and now the expectation is a bedroom for every kid.
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Food is much cheaper, as a percentage of income than it was in the 70s.
1970: wages: $9400, loaf of bread: $0.25.
Today: wages ~$45K, loaf of bread: $2 (on sale)
Looks like wages (500%) increased less than bread (800%) meaning that food is more expensive as a percentage of income today.
People like to buy fast food now, of course, but basic foodstuffs are cheap (not specialty hipster food of course). Basic housing is hard to compare, because location is the most important factor, but do note that in the 70s you averaged about 2 people per bedroom, and now the expectation is a bedroom for every kid.
Could be that the segment that buys housing is more likely to have smaller family sizes, thus the average per bedroom goes down. I'm excluding rentals, because you'll have to account for the smaller home owning percentages today over 1970.
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we care barely pay the rent and the doctor
You can get 1970s-level medical care very cheap - no PET scans, no CAT scans, no modern surgical techniques, none of the vast wonders of the modern pharmacy. Not in the US, of course, it would probably be illegal, but Mexico will help you out. You have to compare like for like.
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In the short term, governements have to help people retrain in a way that
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Workers in the US are unable to successfully compete for the excess income created by the increase in stuff they're making. Why? Many reasons, some social (decline of unions), some market-based (cheaper to manufacture offshore) and some technological (requires less workers to make the stuff, pushing some out of work into lower tier jobs), some policy-based (redistributive-upwards financial policy). I'm sure there are othe
ITIF and Broadband Policy (Score:2)
The ITIF ("A Champion for Innovation") web site claims that their work been relied on by the White House on various matters---including broadband policy. Well... which White House are we talking about? Depending the administration they claim to have worked with, they've either:
I suspect most /. reader have strong opinions on which of these two op
Easily, eh? (Score:2)
"help those who are dislocated transition easily into new jobs and new occupations"
That's some mighty fine crack you're on. Sounds like Marketing speak glossing over something that someone wants hidden.
Workforce transitions are rarely, if ever, easy. Skillsets are often mismatched and can take a long time to change. There may well be geographic relocations (who pays?). And if the new jobs pay less, then we feed the cycle of pushing more domestic production overseas to lower the cost, so that workers who too
private profits at taxpayer expense (Score:2)
"report by Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF)"
Who are these people? What motivates them? Do they somehow represent the workers who will be displaced?
TL;DR. So let me guess that they are a think tank full of 'smart' people who report to industry leaders. What motivates industry leaders? The first thing is profits, which means lowering costs, which means in this case, reducing payroll expenses.
So, yes, they want to continue with innovation, replace workers with bots, and let government
And in actual reality, both are not going to work (Score:2)
The jobs are going away. "Slowing down innovation" will just move the industry offshore, accelerating the effect. At the same time, retraining is not going to do it, because a) there are not a lot new jobs and b) they have far too high requirements with regards to talents and skills. Most people cannot do the job of an engineer, for example. No amount of training will change that.
This story just shows that the ones trying to deal with the coming crisis do not have the skills to even understand it. Not a goo
Who? (Score:2)
Have you ever heard of the "Information Technology & Innovation Foundation" before? Yeah, neither have I. Some random group we've never heard of puts out a "report" giving their opinions, and this is news?
Innovation and Industry Attrition Need to Match (Score:2)
If you want to minimize tears and do your best to ensure that families don't fall into poverty, you literally
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> Not everyone will be able to do these new jobs. I would wager (ha!) most can't; otherwise, they would already be doing it.
So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it. :P
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But what if there are no jobs to transition to? (Score:2)
Or in ekronomic terms, how can we justify paying people to drive the third part of the time-based economy? I suppose I need to review the three parts again, eh?
Part 1: Essential working time for such things as food, clothing, and shelter. Not much of such advanced economies as Germany, Japan, and the US. (Yeah, I think the FAKE conservatives are lying about wanting to protect the farmers and coal miners.)
Part 2: Investment working time for such things as education, research, and new infrastructure. These th
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If they are young and healthy, and I'm just sayin', but they could become sex workers. As a reference, see: all of human history.
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Most young guys (what you're interested based on your handle) aren't interested in such work. Women too but that wouldn't be a concern for you, of course.
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So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it. :P
This is the biggest problem facing modern society. Every job has an IQ below which you're not going to be able to do that job acceptably. Sure there's a fuzzy area where conscientiousness and drive can make up for low IQ, but there's also a point at which it's just not going to happen.
Automation is gradually raising that minimum IQ bar, because the jobs that are easiest to automate are exactly those which take the least thought in order to do. It's not uniform across all jobs, of course, but unskilled jo
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Germany also protects its industrial base as they are not slavishly following the globalization agenda. Mainly because their corporations are not the psychopathic entities that US corporations are.
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Germany also protects its industrial base as they are not slavishly following the globalization agenda.
What did you just type? What did you just smoke before you typed it? Good stuff man, good stuff. Heard of the EU maybe?
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Re: Implying implications (Score:2)
The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs. Because large parts of the United States economy have been in a depression for decades.
That our corporate masters, their puppets in the regime, and their shills in the news media refuse even to acknowledge this truth is a big part of why state legitimacy is at a long time low.
Humming "la, la, la, everything is rosy!" may fool a few comfortable dimwits. But it won't fool the millions cr
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The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs.
I have a job. Therefore your statement that there are no jobs is false. Maybe you meant open jobs? Over a million skilled manufacturing jobs are seeking workers, and around here construction is going crazy and there's a serious shortage in the skilled trades.
The problem is there are very few unskilled jobs, and not everyone is able to retrain - it takes a certain minimum IQ.
Re: Implying implications (Score:2)
You don't really believe that obvious lie about there being a million open skilled manufacturing jobs, do you?
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Probably. But not necessarily. Other causes exist. It could be due to being lazy. Or being a millennial.
Re: Implying implications (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea that artificial *intelligence* isn't a threat to people who's market offering is based on their *intelligence* just isn't true. My bet is some of the lowest paid more miserable jobs like nursing home caregiver will be some of the hardest to replace with bots, while information processing jobs will be much easier.
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You win sir. The problem is that most people can't or won't do the studying necessary to become employable in the 21st century. STEM. Science. Techno-something-or-other. Engineering. Math.
But mostly the math. People who can't pass at least high school algebra, trig and geometry probably can't solve the big programming problems. Probably aren't even good coders. Or suitable for other technical fields. That is, almost anything ending in "***-ology"
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You can add engineering, doctoring, housebuilding, programming, and general design and marketing to your list. All of the jobs will be done better by AI in the near and not-too-distant future.
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Not so much. As per standard market operations, as technological advances free workers from old jobs, there is supposed to be a, for lack of a better word, budget to retrain those emancipated workers for new jobs in areas where the company is growing. Of course, this assumes that your company is pro-growth (apparently, a number of them aren't), and that your company wants to be at the top of its respective market(s) (some seem content to be the thousandth also-ran).
For some odd reason, companies aren't doin
colleges also need to be more open on going certs (Score:2)
colleges also need to be more open on going certs / people who want to learn new skills but don't want to takes 1-2 years of filler and fluff classes + don't want to retake classes as there credits don't fully transfer
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It's cheaper to give them income than to loose tons of angry, desperate people on the public.
Cheaper for who? Definitely not the tax payer.
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There won't be a whole lot of taxpayers left once automation has run its course. Most likely the few jobs left will be electrician, plumber, and appliance repair man; of course, no one will have the money to hire them.
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Because without money to survive in the mean time and money for that training (since employers don't offer it anymore), they will have no choice but crime. Do you want that?
And if you don't think people are hindered or obstructed from finding other means of support, try plowing your front yard to plant wheat or corn and getting some chickens for the back yard. Then mark on your calendar how long it takes for someone from zoning enforcement to write you a summons.
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That balance needs a lot of working 20-something new grads able to shop and the nice parts, crime free of a city able to support a quality shopping experience.
So the retrained old workers can drive out to their new jobs and sell to 20-something new grads who work on AI, robotics and have a wage to spend.
The part most city areas are missing is the low c
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Please stop assuming electrician is some dustbin job to sweep excess labor into.
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Either they succeed, great!
Or Darwin Award.
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Quite right. That's plumbers.
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Given your nick, you should be able to see the pitfalls from a mile away.
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Rephrased: the retrained person with a work ethic and diligence to study and retrain, or the lazy millennial?
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Unfortunately one of those unsuited ones is currently occupying the WH with his illegal immigrant of a wife.
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250K isn't even enough to populate earth in a reasonable way while ensuring well-varied procreation, let alone exploring the galaxy. In a non-resource-constrained society, why should population growth be limited? The more people we have, the more likely one or more of them will make important advancements.