12-28-2016, 05:03 PM
Quote:We are far more capable now than we ever have been.
A statement that was equally true in 2000, 1990, 1950, 1850, 1700...
Quote:During my working life, I watched good paying jobs disappear due to the digital revolution, and the answer was always the same: retraining. Except the window was always smaller.
Always, huh? So I take it then that workforce participation has been declining the entire time you've been working? Just one long slide down the slippery slope of obsolescence?
Quote:Retraining requires some level of base knowledge, and the base knowledge changes every 10 years. So how does this work for a 40 year career?
My father doesn't have a college degree, and learned how to program on uninterpolated punch cars after injuring himself in a trucking accident. He works for Microsoft. I have a history degree, and a programming job, using a skill I developed less than year before. We're managing. And this is only talking about people working in the tech sector. Think of the job categories that exist now, that would have seemed exceedingly odd 10 or 20 years ago. This is less the end of work that you're talking about than it is the end of work as it existed in your memory.
Quote:Companies are deciding it doesn't, so they are plowing ahead with technology. Except this time, the basic skills that make us human are being replicated by machines. Vehicle operators (the #1 low tech job in the country) will be unneeded in 20 years. Factories are already automated, as are warehouses and most other repetitious activities. With AI, non-repetitious activities are next. Why educate lawyers when expert systems can do the same jobs. MDs are on the same short list, and surgeons are next.
So no, you did not bother to look at the info showing that even in the most technologically sophisticated and wealthy countries, manufacturing employment as a share of the population has not collapsed the way it has here. You're just going to repeat "But they've all been automated away" because you heard it somewhere. Right.
Has the demand for legal services gone down? Recent issues in job placement for new graduates seem to have less to do with the inevitability of technological obsolescence as they do the issues and rigidities in the way we train and fund new lawyers, and the restrictions placed on them.
Has employment in the health industry declined while I wasn't looking? Do manufacturing and logistics jobs to support goods consumed in the US not count as requiring human labor just because it isn't American labor doing it? Do you have any idea how many people it takes to build and ship an Ipod?
Quote:I worked in technology for almost 50 years. The pace of change at the end of my sojourn was staggering. Automating away all the jobs that don't require highly advance knowledge and decision making skills (even many that do) means planning for the future of today's children is literally impossible. We're proud of this, but why? People are not that flexible that they can tear their lives apart 4 or 5 times, and survive -- to say nothing of thrive. It will only accelerate in the future.
So yes, the fully automated future will have to arrive, because humans will not be able to survive the pace of change.
Yes, the world has changed over 50 years. How amazing!
I am missing the bit where you actually, you know, provided evidence that ALL JOBS WILL VANISH in the next 20 years, as opposed to merely asserting that it MUST because PROGRESS! DO you understand the difference between the two?