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Originally Posted by scirocco
I do think 20 years is a liberal estimate for widescale automation of many jobs and tasks. Looks to me, and from speaking with some savvy people in the area , more like 5-10 years.
We could see an inevitable emergence of a true welfare state in the nation, as many workers are displaced en masse from traditional forms of employment. For those who maintain and design the automation industry, higher wages than ever before will surely prevail. The decision will have to be made to tax those working and their corporations enough to cover the costs of assistence for displaced and retired through no fault of their own employees. They will be quite a few in this category in the next decade and thereafter.
Look to see a new world order of tech automation empires facing off against a strong growing movement of those favoring equal opportunity for human workers. Give it another few years and then we all will just put down the protest placards and enjoy the free lunch provided to all the malcontents. All in the form of social welfare payments derived from the taxes of the new tech giants.
The airwaves and webways will be saturated with ads and propaganda telling us how wonderful life is without having to work. For most the message will settle in and just get on with their lives. Those working in life automation will see financial rewards and net worth's to make the current batch of tech billionaires look very measly indeed.
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5-10 years is a more accurate timeline, especially considering that large numbers of workers are already being replaced by robotics and software. More and more are being replaced every day, and the pace is increasing every day.
Fast food and retail workers can already be easily replaced by robotics and software operated kiosks, it's just that the price point isn't quite there yet for it to be mainstream.
Professional drivers will start to be phased out in the next 5 years as self driving car technology and drone usage become more mainstream. There are millions of people and thousands of towns that survive by providing food and lodging services that support these drivers. Insurance companies will see huge dips in profits, as will cities relying on income from ticketing drivers when self driving cars become more mainstream.
Most middle class white collar work is repetitive, and anything repetitive can be largely automated, which is what we are already seeing as software becomes more sophisticated and capable of making the sort of judgement calls humans have traditionally been required to make.
There will be less need for military and law enforcement personnel as drones and robotics can do a far better job of air, ground, and sea combat. There was just a news story of an AI controlled fighter jet completely crushing an expert fighter pilot with decades of experience. AI combat drones can make decisions 1000x faster than humans, have perfect aim, require zero training, and are largely expendable. A large part of the US economy currently relies on the massive military spending and the large numbers of soldiers we have.
The few factory workers that are left will be replaced by robotic systems within the next 5-10 years easily.
Skilled blue collar work will see less and less demand as traditional construction methods get phased out, and new construction methods utilizing modules with built in plumbing and electricity are used. This might not be for another 20 years, however, so electricians and plumbers are probably safe jobs for the immediate future.
Virtual Reality will increasingly eliminate the need to even leave the home, and in 10 years most of us who still have jobs will probably work out of the home. Why go to a fancy restaurant when you can plug into the VR system and have a simulated dining experience, and a drone can fly in five star restaurant food expertly prepared by a robotic chef that makes a perfect meal every time, in 1/10 of the time as the human chef did? This sort of thing will be commonplace in 10 years.
The entire oil industry may likely collapse (or severely contract) as the need to drive places vanishes, and electric vehicles become more common.
The need for teachers will decline as online learning experiences become more common. In fact, with information being so freely available, schools and universities as we know them may undergo huge transitions.
Engineers and software developers will thrive, because they will be the ones doing all this automating.
Basically, 90% of the professions we have today will be obsolete in the next 5-10 years and the world will be a completely different place. New kinds of jobs will be created, but not nearly fast enough. Universal basic income will be a necessity - it's either that, or civil unrest and rampant war and poverty.
The next 10 years are going to be a wild ride, so get strapped in. If universal basic income becomes reality, then expect the entertainment industries to dramatically expand, as nobody will have anything to do other than watch television, read books, or play video games.
In 50 years, artificial intelligence will likely have long since surpassed our own intelligence. At this point, humans will be rendered completely obsolete as there would be nothing a human could do that an AI could not. Science and technology will advance faster through AIs in a single day than what human scientists and engineers could accomplish in 10,000 years.
At this point, you will have the handful of the elites of humanity who are controlling everything, and everyone else who now have zero value to the economy. The elites could just kill them off, but a more humane and likely scenario would be to have them wile away the rest of their lives in virtual reality run by AI's, and the neural connections will make the virtual reality indistinguishable from reality. The AIs might even wipe our memory and make us unaware that we ever had a live outside of the simulated virtual reality world. Humans need to work to feel dignity and self worth, and so the scenarios the AIs place us in might have us working fields all day in 12th century Europe or doing paperwork in a 1960s Manhattan office. For that matter, what if we are already in a virtual reality system? We would have no way of knowing. This is precisely why visionaries like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk suggest that the universe as we know it is already simulated. And if it's not already, it soon will be.
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