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The immediate interesting one is trucks and cabs. 1.8 million heavy truck drivers. Down to 10% of that in 10 years? The obvious place for the self driving vehicle is not the cities. It is the long haul trucks. How soon? 5 years? Maybe less. 10 years it is all over.
There are relatively few who will be needed to design and build those robots. So unless your kids happen to reach the top of the heap in a very competitive field, they will very easily be out of luck and wind up worse off than you, no matter how hard they work... unlike previous generations, where even those who did not become the top-level white collar workers could still earn a living.
There are many building "high tech" products now. Many of these jobs are somewhat labor intensive and require demanding skills...and at the same time, could be automated. The thing is-automation costs money, and a lot of it. It works when you are cranking out a few million of the same product. Not so much in smaller, more dynamic manufacturing companies that make a variety of different products. Opportunities are there, and if we can simplify and automate the production of high volume products (think iPhones or Samsung S5s) we have the chance to bring that production back to this country, with very highly skilled and compensated workers controlling the automation doing the mundane, low skill work. If we truly want to bring work back into this country and eliminate outsourcing we would be embracing automation.
Instead, the simple minded in this country (particularly those in office) will look for 19th century solutions, scream "union" and expect to be highly paid for work that can be done by a machine. While consumers buy better built products produced by lower wage workers, or those build by machines, in other countries. What is worse is that we are "educating" future generations with no skills needed to compete in a global economy. Our science and math standards are pathetic by international standards, and we have a minimal emphasis on skilled trades (welders, machinists, CNC operators, fabricators, etc) with skills required to actually build something. But hey, we taught "diversity", art appreciation and finger painted and listened to music in class so it's all good.
Last edited by Toyman at Jewel Lake; 07-20-2014 at 11:34 PM..
Amazon wants 10,000 robots on their floors by the end of the year. That could mean employees will be laid off for the robots.
What do you think?
There must be an assembly line to put together robots. Maybe robot factories will be the next big blue collar job.
Uh, but if the robot company is Skynet...nevermind.
But seriously, robotics and drones assembly may be the next big blue collar industries and college kids that major in those fields should have no trouble getting white collar jobs.
There are relatively few who will be needed to design and build those robots. So unless your kids happen to reach the top of the heap in a very competitive field, they will very easily be out of luck and wind up worse off than you, no matter how hard they work... unlike previous generations, where even those who did not become the top-level white collar workers could still earn a living.
If they're under the age of 10 the person you replied to might as well forget it. People think in linear terms, which is why they have issues with the folding paper question. if you fold a piece of paper in half most people can do that 7 times, the world record is 12 I think. what if the paper could be folded more?
7 folds is the thickness of a notebook at 128 pages
10 folds is the width of a hand
23 folds is one kilometer thick.
42 folds gets you to the moon.
81 folds is 127,786 light years-almost as thick as the Andromeda galaxy.
103 folds you will be outside of the observable universe.
But if you asked someone if they had a big enough piece of paper could they fold it 42 times, and most would say yes I suspect.
Human beings have problems with this sort of idea. And yet, thats what computers have been doing every two years.
5 years from now a $4,000 computer will have the computational ability equal to a human brain at the rate of change we are seeing. The real challenge will be software. Don't underestimate the challenge here, but also look at the past where people said "computers will never replace a human at driving". It was a common belief amongst computer scientists who regularly scoffed at books and tv shows that depicted this. And these are the people who should understand moores law the best!
Now lets look 16 years after that. 2035. A $4,000 computer can do enough calculations to replace 256 human brains. Your newborn child today at age 21 is entering the workforce. he is 1/256th as capable intellectually as a computer. The first AI's probably occurred a decade prior in 2025. But I figure really good expert systems are only 5 years from now.
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