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Actually it means quite a lot. I can do things on the computer that my parents and grandparents couldn't even imagine. I qualify for jobs that people the previous generation diidn't even know existed.
They are smarter these days. Back in the 1800s and the early 20th century the concept of "educated" was someone who knew how to read and understand basic arithmetic. All of this higher learning in advance mathematics was MOSTLY for elite and rich. Even something that we think of as basic like geometry and algebra would have only been for people who had an elite education.
No, I probably couldn't do anything that they did in 1865. That doesn't make me dumber than them. I wouldn't be able to do it, because in modern life there is no need to. The thing you don't say about 1865 is that they lacked all of these technological innovations, and did almost everything by hand. And in such life expetency was 39 years old. That means that me, at 36 would be 3 years from a natural death. Regressing is VERY hard for anyone. Similarly I don't think someone in an 1865 world could go back 1,000 years in Africa and learn to hunt and craft spears for their survival. This is a pretty weak argument.
Most people in general would die if they were transported to a time when they had less resources. People died earlier and more frequently 200 years ago. This doesn't give the 1700 mind more intellect.
You don't appear to know the difference between education vs. ignorance and intelligence (smarter) vs. stupidity (less smart). They are completely different concepts. As stated by a sign hanging in one of my high school classrooms, "Stupidity is permanent; ignorance can be fixed"
Your argument is that someone from the 19th century is somehow less intelligent (less smart) because they are ignorant of skills needed to survive in the modern world, which is completely false logic. And to throw a good dose of double-standard in the mix, when I point out that you are ignorant of the skills needed to survive in the 19th century, you claim that your own logic no longer applies (you said, "weak argument"). By chance, do you work in talk radio?
And again, people in the 19th century were less educated for the simple reason that high level educations were a luxury reserved for the rich. Everyone else was too busy working to survive to spend time learning reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. They were not less intelligent. If a 19th century child were transported to now, that child would grow up just as educated and functional as my children.
Also again, I didn't say the people in the 1700's or 1900's had more intellect, I said they had similar intellects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by branh0913
The market would meet these demands. And who is to say you really NEED training? Let me explain. Back in 1992, the AVERAGE person had no clue how to use a computer. It wasn't uncommon for people not to even know how to turn the damn thing on. What ended up happening? Well kids learned computers in schools. Then taught their parents how to use them. How many times do you hear of people 20-30 years old signing their parents up to facebook, or setting up the computer for their parents? All the time.
Now why do I mention this? well because computer themselves have become domesticated. The reason why more people can use a computer, and learn computer concepts is because more people HAVE computers. And more people can become proficient and even learn computer jobs. Robotics will become the same way. Just like people learn to program there VCR or learned to turn on their computer to watch their favorite cat videos and world star hip hop vids, we will have people who can program complicated robots like it's a second thought. And those people will be able to have careers working with robots and technology.
First, this is a very simplistic view of life. These two paragraphs only apply to youth who grow up with new technology. What about the 40-yr-old factory worker whose job was taken by a machine? Are you suggesting his kids will be able to teach him enough about programming robots to get a job programming robots???? My mom has been around computers all her life. She worked with computers back in the day when she fed them punch cards, continuing through many decades using accounting software. And yet still I have to help her with Windows and her iPhone. There is no way she would ever learn enough about computers to ever conceive of a job programming robots. You live in a very strange world if you think this is the case.
Second, "The market would meet these demands." I love idealistic, empty, and unrealistic statements like these. The only way the market would be interested in meeting any demands is if there is money to be made. That's how a capitalistic market works. So yet again, where does that money come from? It definitely won't come from the recently laid-off worker with a mortgage and two kids to feed. They won't be able to afford food, much less tuition in a private robot-programming technical school.
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Originally Posted by branh0913
If I asked someone from 1982 to log into a high secure transaction system from a mobile device. You would go and get your most talented software engineers to figure it out. You wouldn't get your 18 year old high school dropout to do it. But now days even a high school dropout can do that.
If logging "into a high secure transaction system from a mobile device" were as simple as touching an icon then typing a login and password, then a high school dropout from 1982 would be just as competent as a high school dropout from today.
One more thing, back to your original post. You said jobs creating by your robotic burger-flipping industry would offset the jobs lost to human burger flippers, but you apparently skipped a few math classes. There are about 35,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide. I each location loses 12-17 workers, that's 420,000 to 595,000 jobs lost worldwide. In exchange you'll get a few hundred to maybe a few thousands new jobs creating robots and assembly lines. Add in a few thousand short-term construction jobs building the new "burger kiosks", and a few thousand jobs where people service the new robots. By my rough calculations you're still short somewhere between 400,000-500,000 jobs in the long term. Better start collecting those robot taxes to help offset the extra burden on social welfare programs.
The sheer number of jobs needed to have an economically independent citizenry would stagger the imaginations of most people, the lack of financial independence means we will need to support those who are otherwise unsupported by the economic reality of this rise of the machine. Sometimes, the same folks who are cheering the mass utilization of machine labor are found advocating for a lessening of social services to those who have become economically marginalized, instead, they castigate the unemployed as leeches on society, insisting that they simply aren't trying hard enough. Old norms associated with our work ethic produces this view, no doubt about it, but that thinking is one of the reasons we have failed to see this problem in terms of something we can fix.
"Sometimes"?!?! Have you listened to conservative talk radio or even Fox "News" lately?
I consider myself a moderate conservative (I'm a moderate in most things, but I lean conservative more often than I lean liberal). I am an educated white-collar worker (professional engineer). I'm using one of my three computer screens to type this on my lunch break. At the same time, I fully respect the skills and earning potential of skilled blue-collar workers such as my entire extended family (mechanics, oil-field workers, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, welders, etc.).
I get sickened every time I bother to listen to conservative media. It baffles me to see a "Rush is Right" or "Trump for President" sign in the front yard of a lower-middle-class worker who will likely lose their next job because the rich company owner shipped it overseas. I'm flabbergasted by middle-class workers parroting the ultra-rich talk-show hosts calls to lower tax rates for the ultra rich.
There's no "sometimes" involved. It's all the time.
...
The market would meet these demands. And who is to say you really NEED training? Let me explain. Back in 1992, the AVERAGE person had no clue how to use a computer. It wasn't uncommon for people not to even know how to turn the damn thing on. What ended up happening? Well kids learned computers in schools. Then taught their parents how to use them. How many times do you hear of people 20-30 years old signing their parents up to facebook, or setting up the computer for their parents? All the time.
Now why do I mention this? well because computer themselves have become domesticated. The reason why more people can use a computer, and learn computer concepts is because more people HAVE computers. And more people can become proficient and even learn computer jobs. Robotics will become the same way. Just like people learn to program there VCR or learned to turn on their computer to watch their favorite cat videos and world star hip hop vids, we will have people who can program complicated robots like it's a second thought. And those people will be able to have careers working with robots and technology.
Everyone will become technical. And it doesn't require a whole lot of intelligence to do.
...
The funny thing is that mobile technology is now replacing traditional POS systems. The average person knows how to launch software, launch transaction software, view their transactions, authenticate into several high secure systems, etc. And this software has issues, which is resolved by people who work on cellphones. Even something like ending a task is still a pretty technical task. If I asked someone from 1982 to log into a high secure transaction system from a mobile device. You would go and get your most talented software engineers to figure it out. You wouldn't get your 18 year old high school dropout to do it. But now days even a high school dropout can do that.
So this should tell you that the average technical competency is high. And it will only get higher.
The ability to use a computer or a cell phone should not be confused with the ability to create or even fix a computer or a cell phone. Literally billions of dollars and cumulatively thousands of years worth of work have gone into making both computers and smartphones intuitive to use. The reason most people can "authenticate into several high secure systems" is that the inner workings of those have been successfully hidden from them, not because the common person has mastered secure authentication. *Consuming* technology should not be confused with understanding it.
If your secondary education was anything like mine, a majority of the people in your math classes disliked story problems and weren't very good at them. I think this is a telling example of how prepared people will be for an automated future, because story problems are comparable to the type of thinking required to support complex systems. You have to see relationships between multiple actors and items and translate many of them into a different form to complete the analysis. A story problem is a microcosm of what happens in software development or even regular engineering, and if a majority of high schoolers have trouble with simple problem-solving involved in story problems I have a hard time imagining how a majority of them are going to learn more complicated tasks.
The issue isn't training - as technology evolves, it will become increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change. It will take more education to be useful, and the effective lifespan of usefulness for what's learned will grow shorter. Future workers will not only need to be able to understand complex things, but they'll need to be able to learn new complex things at a rapid pace. Things that are simple enough to be automated away will be automated away, leaving things that are too complex to automate. Maybe only half of all jobs have enough complexity to be beyond what could be automated with today's technology given sufficient resources to do so. The resource cost of converting to automation will come down, and those jobs will be chipped away at. New tech will come with automation already planned into it, meaning relatively few non-expert positions even in new tech companies.
As time moves forward and we move into the next stages of automation, many of the ancillary and support roles being created out of "stage 1" automation will themselves be automated away.
Take the McD's kiosks example. Stage 1 automation will automate away most of the line workers, and some of the low level supervisors. Initially, there will be more jobs created for the engineers designing the kiosks, vendors selling/installing them, and for support personnel supporting the machines. Over time, fewer of these kiosks will need to be built as the market reaches saturation, diminishing the need for engineers, manufacturing staff, and vendors. Most of the remaining human jobs at the fast food joint will be eliminated. The kiosks will likely be more reliable/self-maintaining, or be maintained more heavily by a non-human solution, so those jobs will end up gone.
Oh man... there must be some good stuff here but I just don't have time. You know you are being snowed under when you need three full page downs to get to the end of a post. It really isn't that deep an issue. Automation will NOT create more jobs, it does NOT create more jobs. Sell that on another planet. Automated point of sale kiosks are pretty reliable but most people can't use them so a human operator is always necessary. One human for every six user kiosk. If a kiosk goes down it stays down for at least a week until one of the five service technicians employed by the particular system, for the entire city, can get to it. Why hasn't the loss of all those formerly employed people not spiked the unemployment rolls? Because they are hidden. Some do the honorable thing and kill themselves. Others commit crimes and are incarcerated and not counted as unemployed. Others are fired instead of being 'laid off' and not counted as unemployed. Others move back in with parents or other family. A lot of unemployed Americans are being 'disappeared' so they don't show up as unemployed so people can write posts like this on websites that have the subscription numbers to show wide influence on susceptible populations.
"Sometimes"?!?! Have you listened to conservative talk radio or even Fox "News" lately?
I consider myself a moderate conservative (I'm a moderate in most things, but I lean conservative more often than I lean liberal). I am an educated white-collar worker (professional engineer). I'm using one of my three computer screens to type this on my lunch break. At the same time, I fully respect the skills and earning potential of skilled blue-collar workers such as my entire extended family (mechanics, oil-field workers, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, welders, etc.).
I get sickened every time I bother to listen to conservative media. It baffles me to see a "Rush is Right" or "Trump for President" sign in the front yard of a lower-middle-class worker who will likely lose their next job because the rich company owner shipped it overseas. I'm flabbergasted by middle-class workers parroting the ultra-rich talk-show hosts calls to lower tax rates for the ultra rich.
There's no "sometimes" involved. It's all the time.
Great observation---I changed that one word in order not to be painting things with too broad a brush, BUT, you're mostly correct in assuming that the role of moral police belongs in the conservative space more than one would expect in the liberal camp. A blogger named Joe Bageant, prior to his death, used to castigate the low men in his family of West Virginians for their taking up the conservative anti labor colors, as long as they weren't "messin wit ar guns," "or bortin babies" it's all good. In the pursuit of fairness, I don't like to label all conservatives as moral miscreants, there are plenty of conservatives who are tired of the two party system giving us a "choice" of "the hair," or the hubris ridden "hood ornament" in her punchy slacks.
That is pure theoretical BS, which anyone can judge: are there more jobs available today than they were in the 1970-80 period?
If the premise was correct, unemployment would be realistically very low, almost non existent today.
They sold the public the same BS with outsourcing: let Asians perform simple (or dirty) jobs, while here in US, we'll do the highly skilled and/or creative stuff. For every exported jobs, 2 new, better payed ones will be created. But today everyone understands.
Whole industries disappeared. For example - secretaries. In all offices, women were doing shorthand, writing letters, answering phones. Today the only places those women can go to are the food and retail industries. Bad pay, bad conditions, highly volatile environment.
The US auto industry employed millions. Today, places like Detroit are...Automation replaced assembly line workers. What alternative industry can employ as many today?
Sure, new industries were created: recycling, clean energy, even space travel, but how many those new industries employ?
30 years ago you could deceive millions into believing baloney...Today, we know better!
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Originally Posted by branh0913
The age old argument is that computers and robots will come forth and replace all human jobs. Yet anytime things have been automated it has led to more jobs. Now how can that be? Well it's really quite simple, because demands and needs change. And automation creates new demands and new needs not previous needed. Now I'll present one really good scenario:
McDonalds:
Let's say McDonalds decide to reduce it's in restaurant staff in majority of it's restaurants. It basically only want 1 staff member on any given 8 hour shift. To achieve that, it will allow it's customers to use kiosk, and it will use in store assembly to assemble burgers in other items in the menus. So in the average McDonalds let's say there are usually 5 people on staff per shift. Meaning the store has anywhere between 15-20 people who work in the restaurants. Now there are only 3 people, no including the manager.
So the first thing people would look at is that at least 12-17 people now lost their jobs. And that's true, if we were looking only at a particular restaraunt. One would even say if McDonald did this at all of it's corporate and franchise stores we would see an astronomical loss in jobs. And I would say that's true. But think of this for a minute...
The size of a McDonald becomes smaller, and the overall congestion at a McDonalds goes down as well. How? Because since a McDonalds store only needs an assembly line, and kiosk, that means that McDonalds are more compact in general. And since the price of creating restaurants have become less, then that means they can probably create a lot more restaurants.
This is also important for the staff, as there job becomes a lot more technical. Instead of simply delivering hamburgers, what they instead do is manage the delivery of hamburgers. This means they're probably more concerned with ordering food for the restaraunt, managing the inventory, and managing the flow of money into the restaraunt. They are also probably going to do rudimentary maintanence on kiosk and escalate issues with software.
But still this doesn't say how this would create more jobs. Well here it is. Since you create more McDonalds, that creates more demand for assembly lines in stores. This creates more need for a support staff who is remote, and this creates more needs for kiosk. We must understand that this sophiscated supply chain for just a single store creates a major need and demand not previously seen. Because McDonalds is now producing more overall volume for less money, the demand for more equipment, and people who can build it skyrockets.
Now we've create economic activity. Because every machine needs to be built, every piece of software needs to be supported, and quality needs to constantly be assured. For every robot that exist there needs to be someone who builds them. And this will create explosive economic growth.
I closing, there have always been people who stood in the way of technological progress due to fear. But the only reason why we're a rich world is due to technology. So why do we care if we get rid of a dozen positions yet create thousands more?
You don't appear to know the difference between education vs. ignorance and intelligence (smarter) vs. stupidity (less smart). They are completely different concepts. As stated by a sign hanging in one of my high school classrooms, "Stupidity is permanent; ignorance can be fixed"
Your argument is that someone from the 19th century is somehow less intelligent (less smart) because they are ignorant of skills needed to survive in the modern world, which is completely false logic. And to throw a good dose of double-standard in the mix, when I point out that you are ignorant of the skills needed to survive in the 19th century, you claim that your own logic no longer applies (you said, "weak argument"). By chance, do you work in talk radio?
And again, people in the 19th century were less educated for the simple reason that high level educations were a luxury reserved for the rich. Everyone else was too busy working to survive to spend time learning reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. They were not less intelligent. If a 19th century child were transported to now, that child would grow up just as educated and functional as my children.
Also again, I didn't say the people in the 1700's or 1900's had more intellect, I said they had similar intellects.
Yes, and what do we say about people in society who are "just concerned with survival". We put them down and shun them? Why? Because they're just concerned with getting by. The average woman on wellfare spitting out kids is an ignorant person. But would she be ignorant in the context of the 19th century? I like to think she wouldn't. If anything a woman having a lot of children back then would have made a ton of sense.
So you see, the reason why a woman who collects a welfare check and have a bunch of kids is ignorant in today's society, because the overall standards of what you expect out of a person has risen. I once knew a girl on welfare, she was very ignorant, and spit out multiple kids. I throw her on a slave plantation with the same exact mentality, and she would fit right in. People would say back then she was "essential" and necessary.
So with that said, I don't think people from the 19th century couldn't comprehend our technology. The best and brightest would be able to. But my argument has always been the AVERAGE person in this time frame just would not be able to make such a mental leap. They would not understand how to use such powerful technology.
The average person uses an engineering MARVEL like it's an afterthough now.
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First, this is a very simplistic view of life. These two paragraphs only apply to youth who grow up with new technology. What about the 40-yr-old factory worker whose job was taken by a machine? Are you suggesting his kids will be able to teach him enough about programming robots to get a job programming robots???? My mom has been around computers all her life. She worked with computers back in the day when she fed them punch cards, continuing through many decades using accounting software. And yet still I have to help her with Windows and her iPhone. There is no way she would ever learn enough about computers to ever conceive of a job programming robots. You live in a very strange world if you think this is the case.
I didn't say there wouldn't issues with the migration. But I would think the migration would be more gradual than something that just kinda happens. The push towards the industrial revolution wasn't something that just happened in a day. It was something gradual. People in the agricultural world were eased into this process.
My own great grandfather was raised on a farm. And then moved to Detroit where he got a job working in a factory. His technical skillset had to be higher. But this was in the 1940s where many people in his small country town in Arkansas had already made this migration.
Not every fast food job is going to be replaced by Kiosk. Will this happen eventually? Yes, but it's not like McDonals is going to pull the plug on it's human staff in a day. You sound like you're an engineer, and work in technology. I am too. Now I don't know what your specialization is, but mine has always been large scale automation. You should know as well as I do that while many companies can just replace their staff with more "automated" solutions, it rarely happens right away. A lot of time companies NEED the staff to use these machines to ease the process.
I like to go to a very healthy salad place called Honey Grow here in Philly. They don't even have the staff take orders. They just have the staff cook and prepare food. But there are times when kiosk go down, and the staff has procedures on how to trouble shoot the kiosk. 15 years ago that would have been the job of a specialized tech guy. Just to even reboot the freakin thing. But now because the overall technical compotence of the average person is so high, the staff in the store can do this.
If this same kiosk would have existed in the 1980s, you better believe the manager would have called some on site technician to do this. Even if rebooting it was a simple act. I remember when I was 16 working as a cashier at a grocery store. I remember having to ask the computer person to reboot our cash regiesters. They even had to come and log us into our registers. Today a cashier can do all of this themselves.
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Second, "The market would meet these demands." I love idealistic, empty, and unrealistic statements like these. The only way the market would be interested in meeting any demands is if there is money to be made. That's how a capitalistic market works. So yet again, where does that money come from? It definitely won't come from the recently laid-off worker with a mortgage and two kids to feed. They won't be able to afford food, much less tuition in a private robot-programming technical school.
So you're going to see the growth of robotic companies. Who lack any person to work with these robots, repair them or even understand them. What do you think they're going to do? That's right, train people on the job! Don't you remember in the early days on the internet in the 90s? I barely do, but my uncle is old enough to remember it. Back in the days, we had all of these companies that needed computers, and you had a population of people who didn't know how to use them.
My uncle and my mother (who was laid off) both went to damn near free schools that taught basic computer skills. My uncle got an A+ certification back then in a matter of months, and had a job in IT within WEEKS after he graduated. He made 58k a year. Now that may not sound like much, but my uncle had only made as much as $8 an hour back then.
My mother, computer savvy as hell. Nearly 60 years old and is a Microsoft Office champ. This is all from a 6 month course in basic computers. She does very well with her own business and her now 20+ years of Microsoft Windows expertise.
And to be honest, I'm sure abstractions for robot systems will be simple enough to allow most people to understand them. You don't really need a 4 year degree to build and program a robot. You may need one to design a robot.
So I think programming is going to become way more common knowledge in the next 20-30 years. Not great news for guys like me who make very good money developing software. But this would be awesome for a lot of other people out there.
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If logging "into a high secure transaction system from a mobile device" were as simple as touching an icon then typing a login and password, then a high school dropout from 1982 would be just as competent as a high school dropout from today.
Yes, if I tell a high school drop up to press a button on a screen. You're right, they probably could do it. But the difference is that a high school drop out now can troubleshoot if something goes wrong. What if the software freezes up, what if the software crashes? Someone today without any training had enough of a technical skillset to figure out this situation
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One more thing, back to your original post. You said jobs creating by your robotic burger-flipping industry would offset the jobs lost to human burger flippers, but you apparently skipped a few math classes. There are about 35,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide. I each location loses 12-17 workers, that's 420,000 to 595,000 jobs lost worldwide. In exchange you'll get a few hundred to maybe a few thousands new jobs creating robots and assembly lines. Add in a few thousand short-term construction jobs building the new "burger kiosks", and a few thousand jobs where people service the new robots. By my rough calculations you're still short somewhere between 400,000-500,000 jobs in the long term. Better start collecting those robot taxes to help offset the extra burden on social welfare programs.
I think this post is too long, I'll answer this on a separate post.
Oh man... there must be some good stuff here but I just don't have time. You know you are being snowed under when you need three full page downs to get to the end of a post. It really isn't that deep an issue. Automation will NOT create more jobs, it does NOT create more jobs. Sell that on another planet. Automated point of sale kiosks are pretty reliable but most people can't use them so a human operator is always necessary. One human for every six user kiosk. If a kiosk goes down it stays down for at least a week until one of the five service technicians employed by the particular system, for the entire city, can get to it. Why hasn't the loss of all those formerly employed people not spiked the unemployment rolls? Because they are hidden. Some do the honorable thing and kill themselves. Others commit crimes and are incarcerated and not counted as unemployed. Others are fired instead of being 'laid off' and not counted as unemployed. Others move back in with parents or other family. A lot of unemployed Americans are being 'disappeared' so they don't show up as unemployed so people can write posts like this on websites that have the subscription numbers to show wide influence on susceptible populations.
Absolutely agreed. Real unemployment numbers are much higher, but politicians, economists, and Wall Street analysts twisted them. It boils down to how is unemployment defined.
Is a former auto industry worker (annual salary + benefits + health insurance) that now works a seasonal job at a summer resort (by the hour) employed or not? (job lasts 4 months)...
Are those not claiming unemployment and who aren't looking for work anymore, unemployed? By today's standard, they are not.
The ability to use a computer or a cell phone should not be confused with the ability to create or even fix a computer or a cell phone. Literally billions of dollars and cumulatively thousands of years worth of work have gone into making both computers and smartphones intuitive to use. The reason most people can "authenticate into several high secure systems" is that the inner workings of those have been successfully hidden from them, not because the common person has mastered secure authentication. *Consuming* technology should not be confused with understanding it.
You're right on this one. Consuming technology isn't the same as understanding it. I agree, but the average person can do some rudimentary troubleshooting on their phones. Such as frozen software, or losing a signal, or even understanding a transaction double posting. Let's be real, 30-40 years ago the only person who would have known anything about that was an accountant, a book keeper, or a banker. These days everyone can see their transaction, and people know how to resolve these problems themselves.
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If your secondary education was anything like mine, a majority of the people in your math classes disliked story problems and weren't very good at them. I think this is a telling example of how prepared people will be for an automated future, because story problems are comparable to the type of thinking required to support complex systems. You have to see relationships between multiple actors and items and translate many of them into a different form to complete the analysis. A story problem is a microcosm of what happens in software development or even regular engineering, and if a majority of high schoolers have trouble with simple problem-solving involved in story problems I have a hard time imagining how a majority of them are going to learn more complicated tasks.
This is a legitimate concern. It's not impossible to address it, the real question is that will we ever live in a society where addressing this issue become a priority. I'm a little pessimistic about this, to be honest. I have always stated, that I think the state of the STEM education high schools and university is God Awful. Not only is STEM taught in a non-intuitive manner, but it mostly turns children and young people off.
I don't believe STEM is hard, I believe it's taught to be hard. And educators have not done a great job at relating STEM to things we use everyday. Most people won't understand Fourier Equations and Transforms. But they'll love everything that has integrated circuits. There HAS to be a way of making mathematics simple and making it interesting for students. I know it's possible.
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The issue isn't training - as technology evolves, it will become increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change. It will take more education to be useful, and the effective lifespan of usefulness for what's learned will grow shorter. Future workers will not only need to be able to understand complex things, but they'll need to be able to learn new complex things at a rapid pace. Things that are simple enough to be automated away will be automated away, leaving things that are too complex to automate. Maybe only half of all jobs have enough complexity to be beyond what could be automated with today's technology given sufficient resources to do so. The resource cost of converting to automation will come down, and those jobs will be chipped away at. New tech will come with automation already planned into it, meaning relatively few non-expert positions even in new tech companies.
I think we overlook just how complicated our world is now. Take today's world and put it into 1716, and the world of today would see like a wonderland. We have flying machines that weigh tons that moves faster than a bird. We have mechanical vehnicals weight 2 tons that moves faster than a cheetah. We can talk to people around the world within seconds with just the click of a button. We live in a complicated world. Even this simple message board would completely just baffle the average 18th century mind.
And in all of this complexity in the world, we understand the world around us. It's because it's not complicated to us. It's just "normal". Even the World Wide Web which is a recent invention is so ingrained into our lifestyle, that it's hard to even imagine a world without it now. We live in a crazy complicated world.
I feel that if you transported McDonalds to the 18th century, and you told the King of England about this crazy place. They would probably get the most brilliant scientist and scholars to figure out how to run this thing. But to us, in the year 2016 it's trivial. It's even blatantly trivial in that our most uneducated and dull can run a McDonalds. McDonalds is a complicated thing. A McDonalds store, register, and even the act of assembling food is complicated. But it's so simple to us in the modern world.
I have no reason to believe that us as humans in the future will find whatever new technology to be just as inutitive as we find our technology today. I can't see why even our dumbest can't be computer programmers, or robot builders. We just need to make it as essential of a skill as counting and reading.
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