Science is taking our jobs

For a while now, ive learned about many new automated systems for many different things. (dont ask me to name them please)


Like mining equipment, scanners ect.

and with the dawn of this technology, our companies cut thousands of jobs, upsizing profits, and rendering many people jobless.

After a while, no one will have a job yo get paid for.

what will we do when our grocerie stores are automated? when we wont need cashiers?

My point is, is that some time, we are all just gonna go for a wild ride and plunge into the dark age all over again...

what do you think?

i think the day grocery stores go automated there will be a whole bunch of jobs keeping the machines in good working order. (probably a nicer job than working at a grocery store, too!)

-koji K.

I think the increased mechanization is great. It brings to forces two bear upon the tender noggin of humanity:

1. Get smarter or die. If you can't learn new skills because a robot took over your job then you're genes will fade away after several generations. You can't play the new system? You lose.

2. What do we really want from Society? As it stands now, most everyone not living in a 3rd world country exists within an illusionary farce. As people face more and more pressure from the all consuming Western drive for Profit, they may strike back. Such violence will take the form of world wide re-assessment, hopefully leading to peace, not global genocide.


[edit on 2-8-2004 by ktprktpr]

thats kida cold of you, Ktprktpr.

Get smarter or die...

how does someone compete with robots???

1) theyll never get tired

2) they dont call in sick

3) they wont ask for advanced pay

4) they probably wont steal anything, unless its programmed

5) It wont cost much to pay someone to manage it..





were all doomed

They said the same thing when we came up with weaving machines that took away the job of the weavers in the mills (the Luddites were part of the anti-weaving machine movement.) They said the same thing when washing machines were developed (no more laundresses.) They said the same thing about every new innovation humans have come up with.

Ktpktpr's words may seem harsh, but they're true. The weavers who learned the new machines or new skills survived, while the traditional ones starved. Ten years ago people shrieked about being put out of jobs because they didn't know computers... today you have the choice of learning computer skills or finding a job that doesn't require a computer (not many.)

And yes, I do know what it feels like. I just got downsized. I have a new career I'm training for.

Life goes on.

See "Study: Technology, Not Outsourcing Is The Biggest Threat To Jobs June 25, 2004"

www.informationweek.com...

EDIT: Just to be clear, I am not anti-technology, even when it forces changes on the labour force.

[edit on 2-8-2004 by HeirToBokassa]

The sad thing here is that people's jobs boil down to programable task.

My job is thinking and being creative. Something no AI can do...yet.

I've actually purchased machines before to replace some of our employees. If your chosen proffesion boils down to a programable patter of task then is the issue technology or you. For the last 150 years since the begining of the industrial age there has always been the question, what happens to the people who earned a living doing mundane task machines can do. And the answer has always been nothing.

You asked how someone competes with robots? Easy, out think them. Robots aren't creative, at best they can mimic creativity by using set rules and patterns. So as someone already said, get smarter or die.

Obviously people are needed to code these machines, design them, even if other tech does the actually grunt work of building them.

One day maybe even creativity will be artificial and all of us will be obsolete. Evolution.

Outsourcing means giving your job to someone else just as skilled but in another country for less pay. The same thing applies to machines but less pay turns to zero pay. You just have to fix it and go. A machine should typically last for about 30 years brand new. You guys say thing like "they said washing machines would replace us." Well, the problem is that humans think and learn. We remeber, make relationships and build and take apart things from what we learn. I've read the posts posted here and from it, created my own sentences from my past experiences. I try to keep my post similar to what is expected because that is what was repeated over and over again. Everything I do begins with a premutation from an original idea.

In dealing with neural nets and bayseian algorithms. And not to mention premutations like:

car
cra
arc
acr
rca
rac

You begin to see that things can learn over time and maybe you think you like the way rac looks better then car. Same thing a machine can do to learning something. A machine over time, given the proper algorithms and the right language will begin to "learn" the correct way of doing something. It will begin to see the rac always fits. a given situation. Like a machine today might put together a widget. But a leaning machine will look at it and may see an improvement on it or a permutation that looks better. It might see that as air flows over the wing of a jet and produces certain numbers, it may adjust the numbers of the CAD program to ensure the airflow produces even better numbers. What you begin to have is algorithms that over time produces better and better results without the need of human intervention. You can then trust robots to do tasks and not make mistakes because it has a database filled with the paramters (numbers) of what counts as a mistake that has given to it by humans and passed to it from other robots. Robots think in nano-seconds or faster. The different with the past is that our computers are faster now and our programming and the number of programmers needed to carry out AI is improving.

What happens when a robot can scan all of your documents and do your taxes according to mathematical algorithms on how to prepare taxes. How about interpret laws or build machines. It's all just a matter of time for the right programmers to be motivated enough to build the right set of algorithms that create if else statements and allow the machine to automatically save it to a file and update that if else statment in the file based on new conditions. You know like appending and or read/writing that file based on condtional statements. The machines will begin to think based on the probable chance of what it will set into action is the most logical choice based on a given set of actions it should carry out. Machines could be used for strategic planning, driving cars, building buildings, flying planes, the works.

So, one machines can think ... where do we fit in. Do we let the machines simply create the best possible choices faster then we can think? (Big Blue) I say the choice left to humans is exploring the stars. Most things at home will be automated with the chance for an accident close to zero or (1/n) (where n is infinitely large).

New technologies leading the way:

Internet
RFID's
OnStar
ArcView GIS

Now, try and compare your washing machine.

Gary Kasparov said it is interesting how a machine using brute force and 99% calculation and 1% intution can come up with the same results as a human using 99% intelligence and 1% brute force. He was mentioning how deep blue was able to come up with the same results as a human counterpart. Obviously this is a step in the direction of AI. When I play chess against a computer it fascinates me to look at the evaluation score and actually wonder that this is a machine that can outthink humans.

Technically people like the person to person interaction. The way you started this thread Catfish, give me reason to believe that your also against NAFTA and any type of free trade agreement.

Robots as cashiers koji_K, lol you crack me up. Think of the landfills, and the environmental damage.

Interesting.. People don't seem to argue about televisions taking away the jobs of the newspaper reporter, and live shows.

Toilet is a machine too. I guess someone against tech. would sign up to scoop up feces for a living. lol