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Computers, once only 'bottom feeders', are now moving slowly up the intellectual food chain.
With globalization eroding the economic differences that were the persistent feature of the past, we are heading towards a world where the least skilled or intelligent worker in Asia will live as well as his or her counterpart in America... and vice versa.
Considering that if we use two standard deviations from the median IQ of 100 as a measure of 'giftedness', or 2%, then there are NOW over 60 million of 'em in China and India alone, not to mention the rest of the world.
And they are young, so watch out, as intelligence correlates quite positively to material success.
Damn, I'm glad I retired from programming... and I am in the 2% !
But isn't that good news for the political left and the Democrats? Now you finally have able-bodied people who would never have anything to do and your big government welfare society is finally a reality that America cannot resist.
It that or forced euthanasia or turning homeless into Soylent Green...
That's the absolute worse thing to do. The increasing pace of technological change means that there will be fields employing thousands, possibly millions, in a few decades that we don't even know about today. That means that we need a broadly educated workforce that has flexibility not a cohort of workers who know only one thing.
I don't think that subjects like biology or chemistry or language will be ever completely worthless.
They would have general knowledge as well as specialized knowledge within a chosen field of expertise, and then would be able to fall back on their general knowledge of their given subject should their job become obsolete. So it would be more like starting a really long university education much earlier than students do now.
BTW for those thinking that software engineering is the way to go....
decades ago....testing was done via manual test execution. People had to manually exercise the software.
Today? Test automation, along with increased unit testing frameworks. We have a group using the old method, the employ hundreds of people, and get worse results. My group employs a dozen.
Writing software a couple decades ago required you to understand inter window communications, creating plotting points for graphs manually, creating a single interactive dialog would take serious amounts of time.
Today? I can put something together in about 1/10th the time.
Chemists? One of the places I interviewed at 5 years ago was to make a automated test platform for chemical reactions. Before it took dozens of scientists to test various combinations of chemicals. The were making a smart system capable of estimating the most effective possibilities, then via automation to test 100's of them at a time.
While people here are focusing on the low skilled jobs going away, a lot of the higher skilled ones are being eroded as well. And once a true AI system gets going, NOTHING will be safe.
the pace of change is getting faster. One company I know has been slashing the bottom end of its software workers for at least 5-7 years now. They just don't need the lower skilled devs, and support positions very much. It is as if the rungs are being cut off the ladder.
the pace of change is getting faster. One company I know has been slashing the bottom end of its software workers for at least 5-7 years now. They just don't need the lower skilled devs, and support positions very much. It is as if the rungs are being cut off the ladder.
Lots of jobs have been eliminated by robotics and computerization. There has been a huge increase in jobs for those who do computer programming. I am not sure when we see the peak and subsequent decline. It seems we are overdue.
Honestly, I think all the focus on automation is distracting from the real driver of (US) Job Losses - which is Globalization. Why get expensive Americans (or Europeans) to do your work when you can hire cheaper (and sometimes better) foreign labor.
Honestly, I think all the focus on automation is distracting from the real driver of (US) Job Losses - which is Globalization. Why get expensive Americans (or Europeans) to do your work when you can hire cheaper (and sometimes better) foreign labor.
I respectfully disagree with this although I understand where you're coming from. 20 years ago I would have mostly agreed but today, I fully disagree.
After experiencing logistics and quality costs from offshoring, American companies have more incentive than ever to bring the jobs home and if you scan the business news headlines from the last decade, they increasingly are. Automation makes it cheaper to bring those jobs back to the United States with the catch being that there will be fewer job openings than during offshoring and fewer job openings than before offshoring.
There are also some forms of manufacturing that were much less often offshored the whole time, things like making advanced manufacturing machinery, some chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Fewer of these jobs were offshored yet automation and computerization has been decreasing the number of staff needed to keep these operations going today compared to twenty years ago.
Computers, once only 'bottom feeders', are now moving slowly up the intellectual food chain.
This is a far bigger crisis than pretty much anyone admits.
We don't need true AI for this to cause massive tech unemployment. We only need computers and robotics to become advanced enough to make a good chunk of our workers uncompetitive at a decent wage. And this is a near certainty to happen in the next couple decades.
If our social institutions and democratic, egalitarian spirit are strong, we may end up living very well with little work required. If not, I predict that extreme population reduction and the end of democracy and human rights are inevitable.
This is a far bigger crisis than pretty much anyone admits.
We don't need true AI for this to cause massive tech unemployment. We only need computers and robotics to become advanced enough to make a good chunk of our workers uncompetitive at a decent wage. And this is a near certainty to happen in the next couple decades.
If our social institutions and democratic, egalitarian spirit are strong, we may end up living very well with little work required. If not, I predict that extreme population reduction and the end of democracy and human rights are inevitable.
I don't mean to turn this into a socioeconomic or race issue at all, but I would say it is already happening in many inner city neighborhoods. Its just that inner city neighborhoods tend to be mostly uneducated and/or black and not considered important or relevant to our wealthy owners nor the suburbanites (both predominantly white but shrinking). This is why you see people turn to crime...because it is a more viable option for somebody that cannot make a living wage.
But just wait until suburban sw developers, architects, facilities techs, general managers, etc. become unemployable people. Not because they aren't smart or capable, but because there are too many other equally capable or qualified and just 1 job opening. We saw just a hint of this with the 2008 financial crisis and quite honestly, our (collective) response to that is to have ever-increasing scale and consolidation across myriads of industries. As if we didn't see the effects of too big to fail & poorly enforced antitrust laws.
If we continue down the simultaneous paths of automation, consolidation, and gargantuan scale (and I see no reason it will stop)...then I see no peaceful option beyond living wage (or base welfare) societies which tax the wealthy and provide a rationed wage to everybody which reflects a baseline living standard. Anybody living above the standard would be the lower percentage of people who are employable. Otherwise...society will assuredly collapse, and be a pretty ugly place.
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