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Reducing labor often leads to expansion of industry. So many affordable or convenient things we have are because automation allowed greater availability of goods and services.
Take ATMs, the number of bank tellers actually increased after they grew in popularity. What happened is suddenly banks were in every strip mall, services expanded due to automation.
Reducing labor often leads to expansion of industry. So many affordable or convenient things we have are because automation allowed greater availability of goods and services.
Take ATMs, the number of bank tellers actually increased after they grew in popularity. What happened is suddenly banks were in every strip mall, services expanded due to automation.
If you're an economist, take your field for example. Let's say that you wanted to set up a fund based off of economic fundamentals.
Do you hire an economist? Perhaps, in a consultant role, but you mainly higher computer scientists, statisticians and other mathematicians to develop machine learning algorithms with economic correlations as its foundation. Once, that's up and running, it will be able to process results with more accuracy and much, much, faster than what you can do as an individual.
Once you optimize the process, you need any even less people.
Essentially, artificial intelligence is going to completely replace labor capital, as Ralph_Kirk suggested earlier. The entire purpose is to automate processes to reduce labor capital, to lower aggregate expenditures and raise revenue. A large reason for this is so companies can stay competitive internationally.
Believing that people will be just fine is very naive. People learn from the same text books in school for the most part. They are taught the same theories. You can automate that.
Eventually, there won't be any need for the majority of people. So the next question is, what do you do with all these people? Do you provide a basic income for them? Do you throw them in prisons? Do you let them die off?
Those are the questions that we should be addressing before we don't have the opportunity to dictate our own destiny (to a certain degree anyway) any longer.
Reducing labor often leads to expansion of industry. So many affordable or convenient things we have are because automation allowed greater availability of goods and services.
Take ATMs, the number of bank tellers actually increased after they grew in popularity. What happened is suddenly banks were in every strip mall, services expanded due to automation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pub-911
The numbers of ATM maintenance and repair personnel shot up also. As did demand for many things and people associated with thermal printing.
It's not difficult to look at automation salients and see which are intended to expand their markets and which are designed to reduce labor. ATMs were never intended to replace tellers, but were always intended to expand services beyond the range of tellers, such as beyond standard banking hours.
No, I blame them and their parents for not being honest with themselves that hey maybe getting a student loan might be a bad idea & just maybe my child may have to earn their degree slowly with a decent full time entry job or the military for 3-4 yrs.
Last edited by toosie; 03-05-2017 at 07:55 PM..
Reason: Edited for language
... People learn from the same text books in school for the most part. They are taught the same theories. You can automate that..
Before embracing such hyperbolic doomsday predictions, it would be educational to read John Searle's "Minds, Brains and Science" (see for example https://academiaanalitica.files.word...nd-science.pdf). Prof. Searle points out that computers merely manipulate symbols. They might do this fantastically quickly, but that is fundamentally different from actually thinking about ideas, about concepts and experiences. The human brain, even without much training or with a short attention span, is inordinately superior in its capacity to grasp ideas.
Yes, chess-playing software can defeat the world chess champion, but it does so through manipulation of symbols. It calculates moves, rather than grasping ideas such as attack and defense, or nuances of the position.
I have every confidence that electronic machines will eventually replace any human task that involves sequential response to stimuli, be this cutting of hair, preparation of food, and of course, driving a vehicle (car, boat, airplane, etc.). But I fail to see how an electronic machine could actually "think"; how it could perform tasks that can't be delineated into sequence of observations and responses. In particular, the appreciation of existing theories, and the derivation of new ones, is not something that can be reduced to pattern-recognition, to observation and response.
No, I don't think that retail clerks or automotive technicians or barbers will be "just fine". But I do think that physicists, mathematicians and poets are indeed going to be just fine.
No, I blame them and their parents for not being honest with themselves that hey maybe getting a student loan might be a bad idea & just maybe my child may have to earn their degree slowly with a decent full time entry job or the military for 3-4 yrs.
How long do you think it would take to pay for say an engineering degree or medical degree at 9-20$/hr taking one class at a time while groveling for the time off to actually attend the class? Granted things are getting better with LAGIT online education but those classes are still offered at certian times and you have to log on at those times (which are not at your employers convience) or you simply dont take the class. You still have to go sit for the proctored exams at the local uni's convience (again not your employers convience). Again with the military, the GI bill is so watered down it barely covers a community college education. IF you want to be a doctor or engineer the GI bill is not going to cover anywhere close to all of it if you want to have a decent school on your resume.
So for a BS in engineering its about 140 credits from a lagit top tier engineering school or medical school is an additional 4 years on top of that (FULL TIME).
Your suggestion is overly simplistic and not realistic. If you want to actually practice engineering in a nice air conditioned office before your 40 years old you have to take loans out.
Oh and lets not forget about the subsequent marriage and possibly kids as you are working for 9-20/hr on your 30 year degree plan.
Have you ever actually spread sheeted this out? The numbers dont work unless you are some how able to make 40/hr all year round year after year (not just some one off bacon job) AND you can take off work when ever to take your classes, but then why would you even need the degree lol (unless the job is outside in crap weather and hard work but then would you want to do that for 20 years picking away at a degree.
The whole reason people want the degree is to get out of the proverbial "ditch digging" or possibly litteral ditch digging.
Before embracing such hyperbolic doomsday predictions, it would be educational to read John Searle's "Minds, Brains and Science" (see for example https://academiaanalitica.files.word...nd-science.pdf). Prof. Searle points out that computers merely manipulate symbols. They might do this fantastically quickly, but that is fundamentally different from actually thinking about ideas, about concepts and experiences. The human brain, even without much training or with a short attention span, is inordinately superior in its capacity to grasp ideas.
Yes, chess-playing software can defeat the world chess champion, but it does so through manipulation of symbols. It calculates moves, rather than grasping ideas such as attack and defense, or nuances of the position.
I have every confidence that electronic machines will eventually replace any human task that involves sequential response to stimuli, be this cutting of hair, preparation of food, and of course, driving a vehicle (car, boat, airplane, etc.). But I fail to see how an electronic machine could actually "think"; how it could perform tasks that can't be delineated into sequence of observations and responses. In particular, the appreciation of existing theories, and the derivation of new ones, is not something that can be reduced to pattern-recognition, to observation and response.
No, I don't think that retail clerks or automotive technicians or barbers will be "just fine". But I do think that physicists, mathematicians and poets are indeed going to be just fine.
You do realize that most people are barbers, mechanics or clerks and not physicits or mathmaticians, thus his post was not hyperbolic. Most people will be made obsolete and that presents a very serious problem.
The issue is that once we are a fully automated society capitalism no longer works because only a hand full of people will be reaping the rewards from the robots while everyone else is just out of work with no way to survive other than revolt. In an ideal sitaution the automation would unhinge us to take up things like mathmatics, engineering, medicine etc but the fact remains that the robot owners are not just going to write checks for anyone to register for degree programs for free and even if they did there is still a large segment of useless dolts who refuse to think and they just want to "cash me outside" or whatever.
This then presents very serious moral issues that can not coexist with faith in Jesus. The big question is what do we do with these violent useless people who will never be mathmaticians etc. The even bigger question is what about people that are amazing people but dont have the aptitude for math or hard math based science?
These are going to be very hard questions for govt to deal with.
No, I blame them and their parents for not being honest with themselves that hey maybe getting a student loan might be a bad idea & just maybe my child may have to earn their degree slowly with a decent full time entry job or the military for 3-4 yrs.
When I started college, our best state university charged $25 a credit hour. I made $2.50 an hour part-time. Six weeks of part-time work paid a semester's tuition for a full load.
But that was in 1970. That's not the same today--and that fact hasn't really trickled into the consciousness of parents whose financial consciousness was developed during the easy-credit 80s.
Which "decent full-time entry jobs" are there for a high school graduate that would even begin to pay today's college tuition?
One of the first broad changes than need to be made is to recognize that a bachelor's degree is really only for about 30% of the population. The rest need technical training in a high-skill occupation to earn a living, not a bachelor's degree (they can get a degree later to fulfill themselves, if they want to). That's essentially the "military route"--earn a living with a skill first, college later.
But right now kids are faced with employers that demand bachelor's degrees to fold shirts and parents and school counselors who are convinced that anything other than a bachelor's degree (in anything) is a lifetime booby prize.
Last edited by Ralph_Kirk; 03-06-2017 at 05:59 AM..
I have every confidence that electronic machines will eventually replace any human task that involves sequential response to stimuli, be this cutting of hair, preparation of food, and of course, driving a vehicle (car, boat, airplane, etc.). But I fail to see how an electronic machine could actually "think"; how it could perform tasks that can't be delineated into sequence of observations and responses. In particular, the appreciation of existing theories, and the derivation of new ones, is not something that can be reduced to pattern-recognition, to observation and response.
No, I don't think that retail clerks or automotive technicians or barbers will be "just fine". But I do think that physicists, mathematicians and poets are indeed going to be just fine.
You must get cheap, lousy haircuts.
I don't think barbers are going away; I think personal services will hang around. Automotive technicians will be around, although greater vehicle sharing in the future (which will occur in tandem with vehicle automation) will reduce the necessary number.
Plumbers, carpenters, and electricians will be around.
Poets...maybe not, and if you don't think barbers will persist, then poets definitely won't. A society that doesn't appreciate a good haircut won't appreciate poetry either.
Journalists are definitely going away.
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