Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(12-28-2016, 02:01 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:Think ahead.  At most, we are 30 years away from a world where almost all human-supplied work will be unnecessary.  Automaton and AI will cross the line where the automatons are able to create more automatons with limited human interaction.  At that point, the cost of human effort will be almost infinitely higher than that provided by machines.  We need an economic model that still operates in that environment, or chaos will ensue. 

Killing off the non-owners is a non-starter for obvious reasons.

I understand it is fashionable to say such things, but this claim has been made many times over the past 200 years and has yet to come to fruition.  Did you actually take a look at the info I had posted earlier, showing that the top 3 countries by number of workers per 10,000 manufacturing workers (the US is 7) had twice the number of manufacturing workers as a percentage of the labor force than does the US today?  The Luddites (the orginal ones, mind you) feared that textile machinery would put them out of work, and yet as the Industrial Revolution ground on the number of textile workers soared.  I am presently employed writing automation scripts for data processing (ETL) and reporting, and yet every time I automate one task, the number of tasks soars.  Take one report for one client that was previously generated once a month by hand, write a script for it, and pretty soon they want it once a week, and then daily, then other clients start clamoring for it, and the net amount of work I do remains much the same, even as the output grows.

Why the loud and emphatic insistence that this time is really different?

We are far more capable now than we ever have been.  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.  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? 

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.

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.