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Author Topic: The robots are coming  (Read 214003 times)
Tale
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Reply #140 on: July 20, 2014, 02:33:47 PM

I miss robots.
Polysorbate80
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Reply #141 on: July 29, 2014, 03:05:23 PM

I don't know if or when we special snowflake Americans will give in to not owning and using our own cars when we want.

I doexpect within my remaining lifetime (40+ years I hope unless I really piss off the wife) that we'll have a push to make NON-automated driving of your vehicle illegal, or at the very least socially unacceptable. 

City traffic planners would certainly love it;  Google maps was already smart enough to re-route me around a traffic slowdown on I-5 south of Olympia over the weekend.

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TheWalrus
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Reply #142 on: July 29, 2014, 03:09:20 PM

So, like, normal weekend on the 5, hey?

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Tale
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Reply #143 on: August 08, 2014, 12:46:37 AM

Paelos
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Reply #144 on: August 08, 2014, 05:59:23 AM

That thing shuffling around is terrifying. IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US.

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Reply #145 on: August 08, 2014, 09:01:32 AM

Wait until they deploy the giant paper airplane drones of death in Iraq.  why so serious?

I welcome our new foldable robotic overlords.

Merusk
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Reply #146 on: August 13, 2014, 09:30:35 AM

You're already obsolete, you just don't know it yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Lantyssa
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Reply #147 on: August 13, 2014, 10:51:51 AM

Was the narrator a bot, too?

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
naum
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Reply #148 on: August 13, 2014, 02:30:15 PM

History Will Be Written by the Bots

Quote
Churchill was right.

In the case of humanity, our history is going to be written by bots.

Bots aren’t just mechanical. They are also made out of software.

Software bots already dominate trading on Wall Street and they are making inroads in nearly every knowledge-based profession.

They are also doing more and more of the writing being done online.

For example, bots write nearly all of the earnings reports put out of the earnings announcements by the Associated Press.

One Wikipedia editor has used bots to write over 3 million articles for the online encylopedia.

That’s just the start. Bot writing will quickly outpace the writing done by human beings.

"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
Merusk
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Reply #149 on: August 13, 2014, 07:11:29 PM

Was the narrator a bot, too?

Certainly sounded like it, didn't he? But no, and I can't tell if it was an artistic decision or just because he wanted to enunciate as crisply as possible.


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Kail
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Reply #150 on: August 13, 2014, 08:55:52 PM

You're already obsolete, you just don't know it yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Seemed a bit alarmist, to me.

Quote
"Horses were made obsolete by the invention of the car, what's the difference with the human position now?"
Well, horses have no economic or scientific agency, while humans do.  Humans don't give a shit about horses, but we are kind of concerned about humans.  And even if all that wasn't true, all that happened to horses is that now there's less of them, there wasn't some horse armageddon or something.  The decline in the population of horses isn't some morally horrifying event; assuming we're not talking about some kind of violent purge, a gradual decline in the human population would probably not be a bad thing in the long run.

Quote
"We need to think about what we're going to do in a society where there's much less need for workers."
First of all, it annoys the hell out of me when people start screaming apocalyptic "DERE TERKIN ER JERBS" speech and then when we get to the "so what do we do about it" part, they shrug and say "I don't know, it's just something to think about."  Thanks, guy, really a valuable contribution there.

Second, while I feel bad for people who are facing (or going to face) economic hardships, I'm not convinced this is a new problem.  We've been cutting obsolete jobs and generating new ones for centuries, since the beginning of the industrial revolution at least, the fact that we can't predict the future and know what the new jobs will be doesn't mean they won't exist.

Third, if we DO somehow come up with robots that eliminate ALL jobs, I don't see this dystopian robotocracy where all the humans are in the streets begging for bitcoins while snobbish robots walk past with their noses in the air.  I see a future where I can just buy a few robots, and then kick back and relax as they take care of my shit for me.  The guy even notes in the very beginning of the video that the big shifts in technology tend to come when affordability puts the tech in the hands of more people, but then he spends the rest of his video implying that robotics are going to be used exclusively by huge corporations to put everyone out of work, and the rest of us can't do anything about it.  Robotics are becoming cheaper and more accessible to everybody, not just multi-billion dollar corporations, and that means the benefits get spread out, too.
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Reply #151 on: August 14, 2014, 12:58:34 AM

In a consumer driven capitalistic world, the people have to have cash to spend or it all will break down.  Robots replacing humans to a great extent would be self-defeating.  Humans without jobs cannot spend money.  A hugely decreased human population with less money wouldn't drive the demand for whatever it is these imaginary robots are supposed to be doing.  It isn't economically possible for it to play out that way.  Unless we somehow all believe that the benevolent governments of the world are going to give all of our out-of-work asses free welfare robots while they take care of all the production.  Robot stamps.

Now, if they gain sentience and turn us all into pulp, that's something else.

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apocrypha
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Reply #152 on: August 14, 2014, 01:10:05 AM

Replacing all/most human labour with robotic labour would destroy capitalism in two ways. Firstly, as Cyrrex says if your consuming class has no consuming power then there's no need for the products of your machine labour.

Secondly, all investment into producing machinery (including all forms of capitalist production here - manufacturing, service industry & financial production) increase the organic component of capital, i.e. the labour power required to produce the machinery that then does the production. In the short term this looks great to the capitalist because it seems that it increases their productivity per worker, but what it does in the long term is act to depress the return on investment, i.e. the rate of profit... and that's when you get investment strikes and surplus production and a recession.

And if you have no demand for products combined with low-to-zero profit rate and investment freezes, then capitalism simply collapses and the world enters an anarchic, barbaric dark ages and the choice of achieving global socialism or being crushed as a species beneath the cold, blood-slicked boots of the robot overlords.

 why so serious?

"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1915.
Lantyssa
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Reply #153 on: August 14, 2014, 05:42:45 AM

So you're saying it's best to get in on this now while it's profitable so you can make your money before it's too late?

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apocrypha
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Reply #154 on: August 14, 2014, 07:54:12 AM

If you were rich enough to ask that question... you wouldn't need to ask.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1915.
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Reply #155 on: August 14, 2014, 03:46:50 PM

Well, it is getting cheaper and easier to do this stuff.  You don't need to be a billionaire to run a small business that does mass customization runs of backpacks or something, if that's your dream.

But if they do end up breaking capitalism, it probably won't matter how rich you were anyway.  Unless you use your millions to buy an army of killbots to defend your private castle or something, in which case, all hail the overlord.
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Reply #156 on: August 14, 2014, 11:50:05 PM

Now that I think about it, though, with all the short-term profiteering these people love so much, it could totally happen anyway.  They could put us on the path before they realize it is too late to get off it again.

"...maybe if you cleaned the piss out of the sunny d bottles under your desks and returned em, you could upgrade you vid cards, fucken lusers.." - Grunk
lamaros
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Reply #157 on: August 15, 2014, 12:39:26 AM

Is this the robot or the book thread? There's a lot of bad sf in both so it's so hard to tell!
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Reply #158 on: August 15, 2014, 10:26:10 AM

Yes that video really veered into fantasy land, but it attempted to make it believable with some wild assertions. Yes Doctor Watson will be able to diagnose and prescribe the medication with most efficacy for an illness, but what's his bedside manner like?

Automated cars work great, ok, but who programs them, who maintains them? Most of us know how much these complex systems crash (excuse the pun). Being an automation engineer, I guess I won't be out of a job in my lifetime.

The bit about human creativity was the biggest fallacy, if you disagree I direct you to the Chinese room argument. The application can spew out the music, piece of art. But what was it feeling when it created the piece,or  what inspired it? These are things that count e.g. being effectively being able to communicate or convey a feeling. See expressionist art.

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Reply #159 on: August 15, 2014, 06:54:23 PM

You're assuming the masses who consume the product care about that.  Having worked in the soul-sucking commercial creative field I can tell you they don't.  Hell, listening to the music that's on the top 40 you know they don't.

There will be a lot fewer jobs for a lot more people is generally the point. I've seen this in the creative field where the work of a photoshop wiz used to take days and can now be done in hours. You need fewer photoshop wizzes that way. 

On the construction side, Architects haven't realized yet how much a good parametric system will replace a really large portion of their work, or reduce fees to the point they can't maintain a business because larger firms with better tech investments can churn out buildings, sets and designs with smaller staffs for less fee.  Doubly so for mechanical, electrical and structural engineers who are almost automated anyway because their programs are doing all the math that used to need teams of 3-5 engineers per job. 

Get a good bot who can lay studs in the field and cut them off? Why do you need that unreliable framing crew of 6 when you can have a bot do it with one guy feeding it lumber. Same with Drywall.  All of it made even more precise by the CAD Bot who outlined and delineated things for the makerbot to use.

Also, the video was not wrong about it being a problem if you replace those top 3-4 jobs.  No more transport workers alone is 3.6 million more unemployed.  Retail sales are another good candidate and dying off due to the web more than robots, that's 3.2 million jobs, along with Cashiers who can and will be replaced though not entirely any itme soon, so let's say we only lose half of them at 1.5 mill.  Our peak unemployment in 2010 when things 'sucked' was around 10 million.  We're at 6 million now so it won't take too much fluctuation to make things worse.

Yeah he's alarmist but it's because he's a proponent of the basic income strat, which I think is total cheese but hey maybe it could work.  It's mainly a video to make folks ask, "Um... so where are we headed as a society. What are we going to do when the jobs of 12 of 20 people are irrelevant?"  I thought it was cool because it assembled a lot of robotics info into one place.  Amazon's got to be looking at that automated warehouse and GP robot that can sort pretty damn closely.

Funny how everyone was arguing I'm wrong about Robot cars but when it comes to their job, or society in general, it's a sacred cow.

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Reply #160 on: August 15, 2014, 11:05:30 PM

We probably have to hit a patch of mass jobless-ness before we hit post-scarcity.

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Amarr HM
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Reply #161 on: August 16, 2014, 03:29:14 AM

You're assuming the masses who consume the product care about that.  Having worked in the soul-sucking commercial creative field I can tell you they don't.  Hell, listening to the music that's on the top 40 you know they don't.

If he had actually said this then that would have been a good point - mass appeal cares little for genuine creativity and will likely swallow up this artificial creativity and put artists out of jobs.
But the actual postulation was that humans aren't capable of (magical) creativity and AI can easily be made to replicate it, this really messed up the central point.

There will be a lot fewer jobs for a lot more people is generally the point.

I agree to an extent and it's a good argument I suppose something to be mindful of, but this won't happen overnight. It will be a gradual process over the next few decades and the current generation will adapt like I'm sure generations in the past have during technological shifts. Out of date jobs will be destroyed and new jobs will be created.

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Reply #162 on: August 16, 2014, 05:56:05 AM

Most concern is that it WONT be a few decades but only a few years. Much like adaptation of user checkouts, smartphones and tablets over PCs. The test will come with driverless cars, though those GP robots might beat them since they won't have the regulation hurdles.

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Reply #163 on: August 16, 2014, 06:47:19 AM

The faster it happens the less time there is for people to shift professions.  That is further compounded in that if it happens in a wide variety of fields there comes a glut of people with nowhere to go.  We could be smart about it, but we won't if it comes to that because people are crap at planning for the future.

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Reply #164 on: August 21, 2014, 08:53:57 PM

That video was neither alarmist nor far-fetched science fiction.  The western economies have already been hammered by a similar tectonic shift caused by globalization and the loss of manufacturing (and software, and call center, and resource extraction/exploitation, and...)  jobs to cheap overseas labor.  As the video pointed out, the same forces are at work on almost all the other jobs we do.  Shortly after the time when a machine can do your job more reliably and cheaper than you can, you will be out of a job, just as was true when we reached the point where it was cheaper to manufacture and ship stuff all the way around the world than it was to manufacture it locally with local labor.

This has already played out several times over. Take textiles. In the 80's and early 90's US textile jobs went to Mexico and Central America and Taiwan. All of them. Entire factories full of looms and spinning machines (early robotic devices which replaced the labor of hundreds of thousands of people) and everything else were crated up and shipped south.  That lasted less than decade before those same machines were crated up again and shipped to Indonesia and India and Thailand.  Less than a decade there and those same machines were crated up and shipped to China and Bangladesh and Malaysia.  Guess what's happening now? Those same machines are being crated up yet again and moving to Vietnam and Burma and who knows where the cheapest labor in the world is now, as long as it has enough infrastructure to supply power and transport goods and a government stable enough to give a reasonable expectation of still being in control for 5 years or more (so not North Korea or Lebanon or Syria or parts of Africa, but anywhere else anyone is willing (or forced) to work for pennies per day.  And once the cost of the cheapest reliable labor on earth reaches a certain threshold where it's cheaper to buy robots to do it, those factories also will be shuttered and the jobs gone completely. It is inevitable, barring some other event that degrades the efficiency of the global transportation network to the point that our economies collapse and where your pants are made doesn't matter anyway because nobody can afford pants anymore.  And it's not just textiles, try to find three non-perishable manufactured things at whatever store you stop at tomorrow that weren't made in China or somewhere even farther down the economic ladder.

It's already happening at the other end of the technology spectrum too.  iPhone manufacturing is coming back to the States, woohoo! Um, well, the assembly may be moving back here, but very few jobs are. Robot assembly plants for iPhones are being built, both here and in China.  The jobs are not leaving China to come back here, they are just plain vanishing. Foxconn has an engineering staff of hundreds of thousands, (rivaling the Apollo program) working feverishly with the sole objective of eliminating as many human jobs as possible from the iPhone assembly process.  Because even in China manpower is the most expensive proportion of manufacturing costs after materials.

Seriously, the video brought up some really critical things like driving and Dr Watson and procedurally generated architectural boilerplate, but it might have actually underplayed some parts. How many jobs have been lost to automated checkouts at your local grocery store? How many legally trained people actually write wills any more, or mortgages, or other standardized boiler-plate fare?  All automated.  I would LOVE to have a Dr Watson that listened to my symptoms, specified the tests needed to narrow down a set of diagnoses with statistical probabilities based on genetics, environment, history, etc, looked at all the medications I am currently taking to make sure nothing new would upset the mix, evaluated my probable physiological (or psychological!) response to a new medication based on statistical comparisons to my medical history, genetics, etc. I really like my Doctor, but sometimes I know for a fact she's jumping to conclusions or guessing or lumping me into a convenient category without considering ALL the possibly significant differentiating factors, other times she forgets something important, she is always weeks or months behind the latest studies on SOMETHING, etc. That capability is coming, and sooner or later my health plan will find it far cheaper AND have a higher probability of positive outcomes to have me get diagnosed by their (or their approved) software diagnostician than a human.  Probably in my lifetime, and I'm not likely going to be here more than another quarter century.

Entertainment? Actors, singers, songwriters?  Pop music is already heavily edited and shaped by procedural algorithms that the big music companies use to select which tunes to push out. It's not all that big a leap to go from algorithms that can predict the success of a song with high probability to algorithms that can PRODUCE a song that has a high probability of success.  First with human input for creativity, but not for long.  Anyone seen the latest Michael Jackson video? How long has the poor guy been dead now?  Software movie stars will be coming soon, they've already replaced everything but the human actors in movies with CGI. How long before SimOne becomes reality?  Given the derivative crap on TV and in the theaters these days, it will probably be easier to develop algorithms that write, direct and produce movies and TV shows than pop music songs, especially those that are sequels and continuations/repetitions of specific themes/storylines!

How about technical/creative stuff? Software development of all kinds (the AI to do that is still out there a ways, but I think we are getting close to the point where *I* could write a program that would generate code, especially UI stuff, better than most of the crap being written these days, and software testing is already heavily automated, in those few places where it's done at all), automobile repair (whoops, you still, for now, need a grease monkey to turn the wrench, but how much of the actual thinking required to diagnose what is wrong with your car is done by the diagnostic systems?), accounting (mostly numbers recorded in computers already, and computers are really good with numbers! quarterly earnings reports are already automated, auditing is getting more and more so, etc), um, what's left? cooking? cleaning? lawn mowing? child care? teaching? robot repair! policing? (robocop!) marketing? interior design? driver's license testing? (whoops, no more driving!) sales? (google ads) grave digging? mining? market researching? farming? fishing?  ALL of those can and are in the process of being automated. And once given enough processing power, sensory ability, manipulation ability, learning ability and mobility, at least for the 99% of the times that it doesn't require something truly new, it means they WILL be, sooner or later.

The real game changers are coming from three directions and they are converging very rapidly. Sensory processing, especially vision, mobility, and learning. Unlike the industrial revolution, which, for the most part, augmented human capabilities or was limited to doing only exactly what a human instructed it to do, the new stuff coming can learn to do new tasks. It can adapt. It can move to where it's needed. It can be *taught*.  We are creating, not merely tools that we use to increase our productivity, but replacements for ourselves that can produce without us.  Cheaper, faster, more efficient, more accurate, more reliable, less demanding replacements. As machines approach, and eventually exceed, our capabilities in those critical areas of senses, mobility and learning, just as they already have in things like strength, number crunching, speed, tolerance for repetition, etc., what will our lives be like? Sure, if you can afford all those cheaply machine-made luxuries, it will be great. But what will you be able to DO to earn money to buy them that can't be done cheaper/better/faster/safer/reliablier (hah!) than a machine can? The truth is, not all that much of what the vast majority of humans do productivity-wise from day to day requires true creativity. And a huge proportion of what we do is done wrong or at least sub-optimally. And life in a creative profession is already extremely difficult and competitive, even for the relatively few who are currently vying for those even vastly fewer jobs.

You want to know what life is like in the real world where there are no jobs for the vast majority of people? It sure as heck aint Star Trek's comfortable utopia. Think more like Haiti, or Gaza, or even Ferguson, MO.

I'm no Luddite. I'm not saying automation is evil.  If it is, I'm sad to say I'm one of the black hats, as I worked in industrial automation almost 20 years, starting by replacing human workers with robot vehicles in some of those textile mills as part of the last gasp efforts to keep the manufacturing in the States, literally just a couple years before they packed up all the machinery and moved out completely. I'm just saying change is coming, whether we want it or not, faster than we expect, and our current structures for governance and resource distribution are not going to work very well, if at all, once it does.  So what do we do?  What CAN we do?

Yes, I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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Reply #165 on: August 21, 2014, 10:32:00 PM

I think it's a matter of degree.  I don't disagree that we'll be looking at some changes in the job market due to automation.  But while watching the video, I got the impression that the author was claiming we were headed for some kind of economic cataclysm.  Other people have pointed out that maybe the intent is just that "things are going to change" rather than "it's the end of the world" so maybe I'm overplaying the whole "alarmist" thing.  I don't doubt that things are going to get interesting in the near future.  But it's real easy to look at a trend and say "if this continues indefinitely, we're all doomed, you fools!" without realizing that we're generally pretty good at putting the brakes on things that will destroy civilization as we know it (we've got just about a 100% success rate on it).
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Reply #166 on: August 22, 2014, 02:08:34 AM

In a consumer driven capitalistic world, the people have to have cash to spend or it all will break down.  Robots replacing humans to a great extent would be self-defeating.  Humans without jobs cannot spend money.  A hugely decreased human population with less money wouldn't drive the demand for whatever it is these imaginary robots are supposed to be doing.  It isn't economically possible for it to play out that way.  Unless we somehow all believe that the benevolent governments of the world are going to give all of our out-of-work asses free welfare robots while they take care of all the production.  Robot stamps.

Now, if they gain sentience and turn us all into pulp, that's something else.

We had the same problem in industrialization. The answer was a 40 hour work week.

Unless robots can do social and policy work. Unless they can manage companies. Unless that can do their own maintenance and repair etc etc etc. Then we will still need humans. All that will happen is that we will work less and get paid more. Just like all the other times people hyperventilated about the new technology that was going to break the world.

The real problems we have are resource use. There are limits on how efficient you can get and once you're there then no amount of technological magic will keep GDP growing and people eating.

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Reply #167 on: August 22, 2014, 02:16:48 AM

In a consumer driven capitalistic world, the people have to have cash to spend or it all will break down.  Robots replacing humans to a great extent would be self-defeating.  Humans without jobs cannot spend money.  A hugely decreased human population with less money wouldn't drive the demand for whatever it is these imaginary robots are supposed to be doing.  It isn't economically possible for it to play out that way.  Unless we somehow all believe that the benevolent governments of the world are going to give all of our out-of-work asses free welfare robots while they take care of all the production.  Robot stamps.

Now, if they gain sentience and turn us all into pulp, that's something else.

We had the same problem in industrialization. The answer was a 40 hour work week.

Unless robots can do social and policy work. Unless they can manage companies. Unless that can do their own maintenance and repair etc etc etc. Then we will still need humans. All that will happen is that we will work less and get paid more. Just like all the other times people hyperventilated about the new technology that was going to break the world.

The real problems we have are resource use. There are limits on how efficient you can get and once you're there then no amount of technological magic will keep GDP growing and people eating.



That's a more realistic version of what will likely happen (if it happens).  I was more rebutting the idea of robots who take over virtually everything.

Which maybe still could happen, but not with 7 billion people on the planet.

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Reply #168 on: August 22, 2014, 02:27:07 AM

We had the same problem in industrialization. The answer was a 40 hour work week.

Unless robots can do social and policy work. Unless they can manage companies. Unless that can do their own maintenance and repair etc etc etc. Then we will still need humans. All that will happen is that we will work less and get paid more. Just like all the other times people hyperventilated about the new technology that was going to break the world.

The could do better social and policy work because they don't take bribes. Robots will manage companies much better than any human manager can, because no human manager is actually good at managing people.

WE will not work less and be paid more. The 1% and 0.1% will. Those of us who are not part of the revolution will not be allowed to partake in the festivities.

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Reply #169 on: September 26, 2014, 03:14:54 PM

Tale
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Reply #170 on: September 28, 2014, 11:24:29 PM

They are here, and they are cute:

And in the future, each ball is a grenade  Ohhhhh, I see.
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Reply #171 on: October 03, 2014, 03:00:13 PM

You need fewer photoshop wizzes that way. 

Really?  Because to me it looks like the effect has been the opposite:  photoshop touch-ups are everywhere (so, basically, same number of wizzes required, or even more of them, because there's a shitload of work to do now - have you seen the number of ads everywhere?).



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Reply #172 on: October 03, 2014, 04:27:58 PM

Correlation is not causation. We're photoshopping the shit out of everything because it's easy and less time consuming now.  For example, CS6 introduced the automagic delete and autofill and resize. What used to take an hour or more of clone stamping can be done in 20 seconds and then cleaned-up even further. 

This doesn't mean we're going to have more people doing it as the tools get more automated and the tool algorithms more refined.  The one person doing that can now complete a few jobs in a day vs. a single one.

We've seen the same thing on the drafting side. People who know how to use the base tools in AutoCAD or Revit can outproduce two average people.  Start giving that person plug-ins refined for their workflow and you can squeeze even more out of them, requiring fewer workers.  Hell, in 2009 one company I was researching had a plugin suite targeted at Homebuilders that - if they refined it just a bit more - could replace half of their drafting staff at a minimum,

Their problem was they were selling to people like me who saw their jobs in jeapordy and told their bosses, "Yeah, that's great but it won't work for *us*."   However, had I been the boss (or my boss actually been technically savvy) I'd have bought at least one suite, even at the $15,000 price point because that's cheaper than the 5 people it'd replace in the next year or two.

You've already seen it in Structural engineering as well. In the late 90s the firms I worked with kept 3-4 interns around to do basic drawing layouts and number crunching.  That's been replaced by modeling software that can be done by one technical engineer instead. The team who does Mall of America is a great group of guys I know personally.  They're a team of 4, producing several hundred jobs a year and MOA isn't their only client.  That wouldn't have happened 15 years ago.  It does now because so much of the mundane has been automated and that's expanding into the more esoteric designs as well. You do calcs to check the program, not to do the work.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
pxib
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Reply #173 on: October 04, 2014, 11:06:47 AM

Oh absolutely: Software solutions kill the creative part of creative destruction.

Fewer and fewer skilled technicians are required for... much of anything. The ones that remain are employed creating the computing infrastructure that will ultimately replace their entire profession with a smaller number of more easily replaceable office grunts. So we add a few more jobs at the top, and a moderate supply of crap jobs at the bottom, while subtracting an enormous number of genuine living wage jobs in the middle. College degrees become an even less defensible investment and the standard of living drops with a stair-step CRUNCH as each new white collar profession ceases to exist.

At least the blue collar work merely went overseas. The "professional class" is being dumped to /dev/null

if at last you do succeed, never try again
Tale
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Reply #174 on: October 09, 2014, 05:16:34 PM

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