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When given a choice between using automated machines or human interaction, I almost always choose automation. ATM's over bank tellers. Self-checkout over cashiers at Home Depot and CVS. Vending machines over clerks to buy my transit passes. They always seem to have the shorter lines and if I had to do a little bit of "work" to get out of there quicker, it's worth it. Human interaction is of no value to me when it comes to checkout.
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In my line of work, I get to watch automation and AI take over human tasks on... let's say a monthly basis. It's subtle, but it's happening. Forecasts are being made for needing vastly fewer humans as time progresses.
Workers in a wide variety of industries and roles will find themselves without a job. AI is particularly concerning because it doesn’t really depend on physical infrastructure (i.e. robots) being built. It's software. At some point the best surgeon in the world will be AI, the best scientist in the world will be AI, the best economist in the world will be AI, etc., and soon after that point there’s no real reason ALL the surgeons, ALL the scientists, and ALL the economists (and lots of other intellectual labor roles) couldn’t be AI.
Jobs that involve vehicles and require drivers will likely be replaced almost completely by technology within the next 5 to 10 years.
Technology will one day virtually eliminate the need for human work. (There may also come a day when technology may virtually eliminate the need for human existence.) The WaPo article talks about Universal Basic Income (UBI -- basically, everyone becomes a welfare recipient, allocated the same amount of money to be spent on minimum subsistence). There will be vast changes in how the economy functions, as capitalism and human innovation and entrepreneurship as we know them are phased out. It will essentially be a form of technologically-mandated communism.
My personal strategy is to try and retire early (I'm currently almost 42 and would like to retire at 55) and then get out at 75. The world I grew up in and prospered inside of will be gone, replaced by a vast technological form of Collectivism, and to avoid vast amounts of life-sucking cognitive dissonance, I feel the best course of action will likely be to take my exit.
I just wanted to post this because I looked through the Politics and Other Controversies open threads and didn't see anything even touching on the fact that life as we know it will be changing quite a lot -- in fact that change will be accelerating mightily.
There's a bright side to all of this, and a dark side.
The dark side is human obsolesence. The fact that humans will, at some point, not be needed for employment at all. i.e. Companies where the only humans will be the shareholders. No more soldiers, no more bureaucrats, no more human employees. Compared to advanced AI, we will be about as valuable in the labor market as today's monkeys.
The bright side is the lack of scarcity. A firm that needs no human labor can produce goods/services at nearly zero cost. A bureaucracy with no bureaucrats needs little or no taxes. In a world with little or no economic scarcity, people won't really need much of an income to survive if all goods and services are inconceivably cheap. We might be superfluous, but that doesn't mean our lives would be worse.
I expect that (A) this won't happen anytime soon, so it's not like we need universal basic income right now. (B) this won't happen overnight, so we will have plenty of time to adjust. If anything the biggest risk is the so-called "paperclip maximizer."
My personal strategy is to try and retire early (I'm currently almost 42 and would like to retire at 55) and then get out at 75. The world I grew up in and prospered inside of will be gone, replaced by a vast technological form of Collectivism, and to avoid vast amounts of life-sucking cognitive dissonance, I feel the best course of action will likely be to take my exit.
This seems an unnecessarily gloomy outlook on your coming golden years. There are many reasons to believe that the lives of elderly people will be better in 2050 than they are now or have ever been in the past. We won't need to understand everything that's happening and how it all works. Hopefully we'll be free to putter around in our self driving cars, and do whatever we want, while genius AI doctors maintain us in relatively good health.
We will have to ABSOLUTLEY except that the whole concept of a 40 hour work week will be a relic of the 20th and early 21st century that is about to die. Automation will replace a TON of jobs that will never come back, and no, just like the article states, you simply can't retrain for new jobs and there won't always be new types of jobs that open once automation and AI becomes smart enough to fix itself. And it won't be jobs that are for the lower educated masses either that will be lost. Automation is already starting to kill occupations like Pharmacy, which requires years of education, and it'll only be a matter of time before surgeons are replaced by robotics that can perform surgeries better and faster, with faster recovery times, more accuracy, and who never get tired. It really is a brave new world, and we're absolutely headed to a Wall-E type of existence, unless AI turns into the terminator.
The more expensive labor becomes and cheaper automation gets, the quicker this trend will progress. If we raise minimum wage high enough, it will become cheaper to have automated kiosks replacing cashiers at McDonald's. What can a human cashier do that can't be automated?
How about a smile and asking how your day is going. Can automation do that. I am so sick and tired of calling companies with automation. I just want to talk to a person.
We have talked about it in this forum a few times, but most people here refuse to acknowledge that in the very near future, there will be no jobs left save for a few very highly skilled ones.
This is one of my favorite videos, which I have posted in this forum before, which I think lays it out in terms everyone can understand:
Thanks, I had not seen that, and the horse analogy is very interesting. Horses are big dumb animals that eat a lot and leave huge piles of crap everywhere, but 150 years ago they were ubiquitous and vitally important to us. Now they aren't necessary at all and most people hardly ever see them. Living in Japan, I don't think I've seen a horse in the flesh in more than 10 years.
How about a smile and asking how your day is going. Can automation do that. .
Not needed. I just want to get my products, pay, get my change as fast as possible.
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