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Fast ford workers are demanding $15.00 an hour. I hope they've noticed their employers testing and rolling out automatic food kiosks, and fast food making and dispensing machines. They're too young to remember the food chain Horn and Hardart's food automats. They'd better wise up…..
Bugs Bunny used to get food from the automat, yet people still had jobs. There are automat and auto ordering kiosks at restaurants today (I believe the chain is called WaWa or something). It's impacts are way overstated, usually by cranks.
We are a long LONG way from AI taking over. 100 years at least. The problems of self driving car tech is the best example of the limitations of our AI. I actually think we will need to come up with a new computing paradigm to make AI work. At the moment, our computing is based on the same "if:then" calculations used by the room-sized computers of the 1950s. They can only do what we program them to do. We have to move beyond that.
The potential of AI depends more on computing hardware than anything else. If transistor tech stalls in the near future there may still be viable jobs for talented humans 50 years from now. But not for the less talented. And I wouldn't count on transistor tech stalling.
Done any flying recently? We are going the other way. Every year airplanes get less and less comfortable. For me it is pure torment to fold myself into the tiny space allotment for five hours.
Done any flying recently? We are going the other way. Every year airplanes get less and less comfortable. For me it is pure torment to fold myself into the tiny space allotment for five hours.
Yup. A combination of de-regulation, a consumer base that only cares about price and no longer service, jet fuel prices, rising costs of buying, maintaining & servicing aircraft & their crews have all contributed to that.
I hate it too. Everything about flying from airport check-in to luggage retrieval is torture these days.
But the basic tech is pretty much the same as 50 years ago.
Yup. A combination of de-regulation, a consumer base that only cares about price and no longer service, jet fuel prices, rising costs of buying, maintaining & servicing aircraft & their crews have all contributed to that.
I hate it too. Everything about flying from airport check-in to luggage retrieval is torture these days.
But the basic tech is pretty much the same as 50 years ago.
Airplanes have not been improved mainly because a new airplane would have to be improve greatly to actually create something better then we have now. All we have had in the last 20 years is small improvements but nothing that has totally changed how airplanes are used. Airplanes are also hard to change due to they are affected by the law of physics. Of course the machines many people on here are talking about for example build cars or take orders do not have the same limitations that planes do.
Airplanes have not been improved mainly because a new airplane would have to be improve greatly to actually create something better then we have now. All we have had in the last 20 years is small improvements but nothing that has totally changed how airplanes are used. Airplanes are also hard to change due to they are affected by the law of physics. Of course the machines many people on here are talking about for example build cars or take orders do not have the same limitations that planes do.
Yeah but people thought we were going to seamlessly transition from flying through the air to flying through space. It certainly looked like that in the 60s.
But the same principle applies to other aspects of our technology. Cars, for example. The internal combustion engine is based on 19th century technology.
I'm not convinced that our computing technology will not reach a plateau. We're getting to the limits of transistor size now.
Yeah but people thought we were going to seamlessly transition from flying through the air to flying through space. It certainly looked like that in the 60s.
But the same principle applies to other aspects of our technology. Cars, for example. The internal combustion engine is based on 19th century technology.
I'm not convinced that our computing technology will not reach a plateau. We're getting to the limits of transistor size now.
There are already examples of cars that are self driven being made though. Maybe we will not get a self driving car right now but in the future it is possible. We already have robots that can be on a car assembly line, robots that can move boxes, robots that can take orders in restaurants and retail. The idea that nothing new in technology is happening is just ignorance. You might want to read or watch what is going on with the latest technology.
The potential of AI depends more on computing hardware than anything else. If transistor tech stalls in the near future there may still be viable jobs for talented humans 50 years from now. But not for the less talented. And I wouldn't count on transistor tech stalling.
Just a nit: it is unlikely semiconductor technology stalls.
The more likely scenario is advancements become uneconomic and thus are never built in quantity. This is called "hitting the wall".
And realistically, we're talking about Intel Corporation. Nowadays, it costs Intel more than $6 Billion in capital expenditures to build/outfit a wafer fabrication facility capable of building the next-generation wafers with ever-smaller geometries and denser circuits. (For other readers who might not know, microprocessors are manufactured on round silicon wafers the size of a dinner plate; the wafer is then cut into individual silicon chips called "die" which are tested; the good ones are kept and the bad ones are destroyed.)
What if the ROI on that $6 Billion investment is negative? That is, Intel could build the wafer fab & make wafers & make good microprocessors, but its ROI is not positive?
Just a nit: it is unlikely semiconductor technology stalls.
The more likely scenario is advancements become uneconomic and thus are never built in quantity. This is called "hitting the wall".
And realistically, we're talking about Intel Corporation. Nowadays, it costs Intel more than $6 Billion in capital expenditures to build/outfit a wafer fabrication facility capable of building the next-generation wafers with ever-smaller geometries and denser circuits. (For other readers who might not know, microprocessors are manufactured on round silicon wafers the size of a dinner plate; the wafer is then cut into individual silicon chips called "die" which are tested; the good ones are kept and the bad ones are destroyed.)
What if the ROI on that $6 Billion investment is negative? That is, Intel could build the wafer fab & make wafers & make good microprocessors, but its ROI is not positive?
To a large extent this is some of the same problem with our other technologies.
Green tech... we could have solar & electric powering the world next year if we wanted. We just have to invest a few trillion in the Sahara to collect the solar energy and then the massive infrastructure to transport that energy around the world. Of course no 1st world country wants to invest in those hell-hole countries, and no one has a few trillion lying around anyway.
I mentioned space.... there is a bunch of stuff we could do in space if we were willing to spend the money, but when the Cold War started to rachet down, it just didn't seem that important anymore. There seems to be nothing of any value to collect in space, at least not relative to the amount needed to get to it.
I'm fully confident in our ability to make self-driving cars and robot waiters. I'm not so confident in society's collective will to ALSO create the infrastructure do so, or the ROI if you will. It's pretty clear self-driving cars need their own lanes or roads. A robot waiter would need a restaurant built around it that facilitates it.
We had the will once to create roads to facilitate automobiles, but our country does not build big things anymore.
Yup. A combination of de-regulation, a consumer base that only cares about price and no longer service, jet fuel prices, rising costs of buying, maintaining & servicing aircraft & their crews have all contributed to that.
I hate it too. Everything about flying from airport check-in to luggage retrieval is torture these days.
But the basic tech is pretty much the same as 50 years ago.
Failure of the Concorde has really put a damper on R&D for supersonic commercial airliners.
Without improved range and passenger capacity along with dealing with sonic booms any future supersonic commercial airplane is doomed to the same woes as the Concorde.
It is said that 9/11/01 killed off the remaining passenger market for the Concorde, so it is not all that certain enough passengers would pay ticket prices to make any new version worth it for airlines.
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