Trump VS the Robots

I welcome robots taking over our every day jobs. Then we can possibly become a civilization that mainly focuses on science than having to go work at a factory or fast food restaurant.

But I've been worried about this for a while. This will soon become a problem (maybe in a decade or 2 or 3 or more). We need to come to a compromise now before this becomes a problem in the future. Maybe set something up so that we have a clean transition from manual labor to automation over time. Something that in the future will prevent the average man from trying to compete against a robot in order to get a job to feed his family.

a reply to: SolAquarius

I agree with everything you said. It's kind of ironic that our society's capitalistic rush towards the newest and best products will be the end of capitalism, at least how we know it today.

I think we also have to ask ourselves how much the government will hold back these types of technological advances just to stay politically relevant.

Well be careful about your confidence in all this. For example, my monitor is acting funny, I think it may go out soon. Similarly, any technology is amazing what it can do, but it has shortcomings.

Keep in mind "automation" has always been improving. It can't be confined to a time period. Faster, better, cheaper, stronger. We all know the drill. And we've always had to respond. Education and type of work changed. It used to be you could make do with only a grade school education. At the turn of the 20th century and after, high schools rapidly became more common. At first, maybe less than 10% of the population could graduate HS. HS was like college back then. By the middle of the century, 80%--mostly white--were graduating. I see no reason this pattern should stop. Right now only 40% have college degrees. That'll go way up. It'll probably do like HS did and reach 80% "soon". What we seem to be witness to is a increasingly adaptable and skilled work force. As well, the increasing prevalence of service jobs has--I believe--increased the social requirements. I also believe mental stability is favoured.

The question is can we continue to stretch the limits to keep ourselves useful? That I'm not sure of. But given people in the past frequently misjudged the future, I think caution is due. Like many of you, I've long believed in technology. I've long felt AI will put people out of work, as machines did. But the future holds many surprises. Whether the future favors humanity or not, who knows? But I think there's a good chance it does because humans, like any lifeform, have a desire to not just live, but live big. And that means improving. We're not going to sit and let the future happen. That's not how humans survived. We've always fought and braved the future. I don't think it'll change.

So if I were you, I wouldn't invest in a better chair yet. Don't sit and be so convinced. Things haven't changed THAT much. This isn't evne hard to understand. The people who keep improving own the future.

my job is safe from " robot replacement "

robots may be able to fling poo further , faster and with greater range accuracy and force

but i supply my own poo

plus i can swear at you too

poo flinging munkies future is secure

originally posted by: sine.nomine
Not every job can be replaced by robots, and the jobs that are replaced will ultimately create new jobs in one way or another. A robot workforce would require entire crews of maintenance workers and technicians. Cyber security would also be a big issue. Imagine if hackers could just go in and halt entire industries because plants could be shutdown with a few lines of code.

I guess it's a good time to have that electronics degree. I'm sure programming will also be an extremely important field in the near future, along with engineering and network technology. At the end of the day, robots won't be able to troubleshoot and repair themselves. Especially with how fast technology grows and evolves. And with evolving technology comes evolving security threats and malicious programs.

Hopefully when everything is automated I will have learned how to exploit it for free goods and services..

Every job, i.e. 99% of jobs can be replaced with automation; some will just take longer, requiring more advanced, fully developed AI. And should we hit the moment where we reach truly sentient AI, they most certainly can repair and maintain themselves.

a reply to: SolAquarius

There is no fight left to win.

Automation already exists, already accounts for massive amounts of the heavy lifting previously done by human hands whether we are talking about car assembly, or customer services and is not going away. It is already out of the factory and into the service sector. Large stores like ASDA (Walmart if you are the other side of the ocean) Tesco, Sainsbury's, and others all feature automated checkouts, removing the personal touch from the equation nearly entirely.

If even customer services functions are performed by automated systems ALREADY, I would love to know what sort of fight there is left to win?

In Australia, there are massive quarry trucks, which go back and forth, picking up and dropping off material from the quarry bed. These huge dump trucks, used to require human drivers. Now, many of them are driven by machine intelligence, following precise tracks laid down by their programming, augmented with sensory data provided by radar and laser scans, to prevent accidental collision with human beings, and other machines along the way.

Driving those trucks used to be considered a particular skill, because of their size, complexity of some of the operations involved, and the risks associated therewith. Now, the people who were driving those trucks... well, they might have found work, but how long before that work also goes to an AI? And if this is the path that all things will eventually take, when are we going to be honest with ourselves and admit that we cannot go on basing our worth as people on what work we can do, given that too few people will have gainful employment in that situation?

Everyone worrying about money seems odd. Money is only a way to keep score. " Rich , has many meanings.

Respect - influence - etc. Are also currencies. These too wan and wax, but are overall better indicaters of " worth " than a bank account. Such would take the stuffing out of the 1 percent.

Would that be so bad?

VF.

originally posted by: VimanaExplorer
This is why I didn't buy Trump's job creation myth. When the minimum wage is increased to $15, companies like Wendy's is planning to install automated order taking system than paying the increased wages. If these companies have one bad quarter, their stock prices will start falling like dominos.

I think Trump knows this as well, thats why Trump is going old tech with building of wall, that will be the biggest job creator.

They've already moved forward with the kiosks, and that's while minimum wage is $7.40/hour. Increasing it to $15 won't change that, these things have been in development for years and even if the minimum wage were reduced to $4/hour human labor still wouldn't be competitive with them.

With the wall, the problem is that it's funded directly by taxpayer dollars and the jobs are temporary, once a section of the wall is built, that job is gone. It's like when they hired a bunch of people for the census to make unemployment look lower. It doesn't work. You can't get people working entirely through public sector spending, because those jobs are tax revenue consumers not creators. From a budget standpoint the wall and welfare are the exact same thing.

originally posted by: SolAquarius
a reply to: sine.nomine

If you watched the video I recall that it went over how there are programs to write programs.
I Imagine machines will be capable of fixing machines.
Any human technicians will have to be very specialized.

HEllo ghost in the shell with man machine interfaces in the form of plugs into our nervous systems. Required for all who wish to work with technology and no tbe left behind.

a reply to: SolAquarius
a reply to: TheOneElectric

I think this thread just might be the most important one on ATS today. And I’m astounded this topic has not been discussed to death here by now! Where have all the thinkers gone?!

I’m also surprised at how completely uninformed Members seem to be on this issue. Few are prepared for what’s coming!

A quick reality check:

The CEO of United Technologies just let slip an unintended consequence of the Trump-Carrier jobs deal

…….Yes, low-skilled jobs are being lost to other countries, but they're also being lost to technology.

Everyone from liberal, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman to Republican Sen. Ben Sasse has noted that technological developments are a bigger threat to American workers than trade. Viktor Shvets, a strategist at Macquarie, has called it the "third industrial revolution."

TheOneElectric’s links offer a great primer. And the Hawking interview is a must read.

A report put out in February 2016 by Citibank in partnership with the University of Oxford predicted that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation. In the UK, 35% are. In China, it's a whopping 77% — while across the OECD it's an average of 57%.

…And three of the world's 10 largest employers are now replacing their workers with robots.

…Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive."

All our jobs are getting gone - not just blue collar, but white collar and the professions too. Time to wake up and start thinking clearly.

Our world is changing. It’s happening. But we have a unique opportunity to decide what we want, and build it.

Looking ahead: Do you want a short-term temporary construction job? Or something else?

a reply to: TheOneElectric

That´s why every intelligent civilization in the universe either collapsed or made a deal with artificial quantum entities they probably were made by themselves. The evolution of biological beings is just a state we are in now.

Wondering why we don´t hear from those class because maybe they are waiting for that era to come here on Earth

a reply to: TrueBrit
In reference to the trucks. A couple years back I was watching some construction outside my apartment along a road. An excavator was diging a hole and filling up a dump truck. The dump truck would leave I guess to dump the dirt and return to get filled by the exavator. I thought to my self how easy it would be to replace the dump truck driver with an automated driver a bot that senses when the back is full drives to the dump sight then returns then I looked at tthe excavator and realized with enough AI intelligence it could be capable of digging holes on its own. With out a doubt people with much more ttechnical know how than me have thought the same and are working to make this a reality.

a reply to: soficrow
Yeah I choose the title because invoking Trump seems to draw a crowd. I made it flashy to compeat with the mudpit but right off the bat I didn't want any partisan low hanging fruit s to start storm of tit for tat. I want this thread to be one of deep thought. So yeah I'm a bit guilty of a sensational headline. But it is relevant to Trump and his eeconomic policy in the sense that sure building walls and laying pipes may create temporary jobs but what is the long plan and how does it adjust to ever increasing sophistication in automation? Quite frankly I don't think Trump has thought about it he is a real estate man not some one from the tech industry so unless he has been sitting down with elon musk or others like him he probably doesn't have an understanding of what's coming down the road.
P.s. sorry for any typos I'm doing this from my phone.

a reply to: SolAquarius

Thanks for your response. Not easy on a phone I know. ...Like you, I would like to see this thread "be one of deep thought."

We are up for life-altering changes. Very soon. Hopefully, creating (temporary) government jobs to build infrastructure like walls, tunnels and roads will buy enough time to ease the transition.

But where do we go from there? Virtually the only alternative to mass starvation and riots I've read about is the Universal Basic Income plan.

What are your thoughts on the future? Meaning the future when there are no jobs for humans?

Robotic automation will eventually fail because humans feel the need to work, the future will say, "if it's A.I. don't buy!" If a city becomes fully automated it's population would disappear.

As predicted in the Twilight Zone, "The Brain Center at Whipple's."

A heartless CEO completely automates his factory and lays off almost all of his workers over the objections of his employees.

These are the players, with or without a scorecard: in one corner, a machine; in the other, one Wallace V. Whipple, man. And the game? It happens to be the historical battle between flesh and steel, between the brain of man and the product of man's brain. We don't make book on this one, and predict no winner, but we can tell you that, for this particular contest, there is standing room only - in the Twilight Zone.

Watch it as Serling's story becomes a prophecy!

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: soficrow

An idea I had to fund a UBI is by giving individuals direct ownership of the machines. Basically welfare that gives revenue generating assets rather than outright currency. A lower tech version of this was done in the past when people were given land to support themselves.

I haven't gotten past how you handle people making bad business decisions though. At some point, you're going to have a section of the population lose their assets, have nothing, and need more assistance.

a reply to: Aazadan

Hmmm. Keep thinking on that - but maybe more productive activity than passive ownership of assets?

a reply to: soficrow

Where do we go from here?
Well good question and I promise to attempt to answer it once I have access to my computer and I can type up ssomething with some depth.
The irony of having technical challenges in thread about the impact of technology is not lost to me.

a reply to: SolAquarius

Robots will never be able to replace people with degrees is social justice and gender studies.

originally posted by: DomTullipso
a reply to: SolAquarius

Robots will never be able to replace people with degrees is social justice and gender studies.

don't speak to soon I found a social justice software bot that generates random tweats every hour on topics like mansplaning wage gap ect. I'm sure that weird rabbit hole could go deeper. socialjusticebot