Dawn of the age of robots
nothing wrong with that. who do you think constructs and maintains the robots, more robots?
i'm more annoyed by the robot ramzoinksus actually.
Eventually the robots will inevitably construct and maintain themselves.
who's going to buy the stuff the robots make if no people have jobs any more? other robots?
ml1 said:
who's going to buy the stuff the robots make if no people have jobs any more? other robots?
That is the question.
Hopefully, they'll be programmed as socialist robots. Capitalist robots would just eat the weaker ones.
Robots have been used in manufacturing for well more than 20 years here in the US and worldwide. The fact that China is doing this -- at least in part -- is that wages may be rising sufficiently high. That is why US firms used automation of all types, including robots, in manufacturing. The old Luddite movement was in response to factories and automation and loss of certain kinds of jobs. Other factors included more precision, perhaps more reliability of end product, etc. When manufacturing in China was all by hand, so to speak (like the factories run by FoxConn) when it came back to the US for whatever reason it went robotic. Amazon warehouses use robots to fetch products off shelves for delivery., Soon cars will be autonomous which means cars will be robotic.
In part that is why we have robotics classes and a robotics club at the high school -- our kids will live in that world and best to understand it and deal with it. Will jobs go away? Maybe some jobs; others will open up. Some types of jobs that are dangerous and monotonous will go to robots; why not? There was a time when standing in an auto factory turning bolts on cars that came by at 40 cars an hour was a job that paid well. Now a robot does it. I can't say society is worse off if the bolt tightener is a robot rather than a person. We all use automation whenever we can as it lowers costs. Take the EZPass system -- would you rather wait at a toll booth to pay or use EZPass? It eliminated lots of toll collector jobs. ATMs eliminated a lot of bank teller jobs; the Internet wiped out call centers; and so on.
the unfortunate reality is that good-paying jobs are not being created as fast as they're being destroyed. There is of course no stopping technological progress (and who would want to?). But these days, technology is creating jobs like Uber driver. Until the self-driving car puts them out of business too.
The solution isn't to stop the implementation of technology. But at some point we're going to have to figure out how to ensure that an honest day's work means a living wage.
I was having a conversation about this just the other day, with regard to technology replacing jobs. It is a little thing, but it's relevant.
In the summers of 1978 and 1979, I worked for a surveyor in my town. He was willing to hire an inexperienced person. I held the stick for the guy running the transit, and learned how the run the transit. The transit is (was) a precision instrument, using logarithmic scales to get to the precise angles.
Anyway, these days a surveyor doesn't need a kid holding a stick, or even somebody who can line up the scales on a transit. Lasers and GPS do all those jobs.
It's an anecdote, but it's one of countless others which explain a lot, imho.
As a teacher at Columbia High School I believe it is absolutely imperative that the District consider what it is that we must teach to prepare kids for the 21st century (which is now well along.) Robotics is certainly one of the subject areas that should be taught and aggressively so.
We have a wonderful performing arts curriculum and set of teachers and activities, of that there is absolutely no question! The District should consider trying to get the tech side of the curriculum up to par -- it is not adequate to the challenges of life in the 21st century.
The success of the Achieve Foundation's Maker Madness event last Saturday (see thread on that topic) is testimony to the need for a curriculum that addresses a host of subject areas. Some of these include:
* Robotics and Advanced Robotics which can encompass such skills as CAD and Advanced CAD, parts fabrication and 3D printing, serious coding and a lot of planning and teamwork. I see that set of skills in the Robotics Club and we can expose many more kids to those skill sets.
* Coding from introductory to advanced. I would ignore any AP courses in programming as they are entirely too formulaic -- focus on cutting edge programming that gives students far more room for experimentation and understanding. In this topic area there is absolutely no reason to teach to the test.
* Electronics -- along the lines of how to make devices that use electronic parts and coding. This is along the lines of the new wave of Maker spaces popping up over the country.
* Synthetic Biology/Bio Tech -- let's face it, biomedical engineering is moving down the same path that traditional engineering and production did a century or more ago: standardized parts that are reliable in function. We are considering starting a synthetic biology club that eventually would compete in the iGEM competition. (That will take money, of course.) The book, Regenesis, by George Church has a terrific description of that movement.
We have raised quite often making a permanent Maker Space at Columbia HS open to the entire District. For that and for the other courses we do need, of course, space dedicated to making it work. We have three gyms, a pool, two playing fields, a weight room, a dance studio and a wrestling room, the Auditorium, Black Box Theater and two huge music rooms, and a TV studio and huge library that is not used very much for traditional library use. All science and tech are squirreled away in mostly very old classrooms. The robotics club has no club room yet -- with a glimmer of hope of perhaps sharing it with the custodians (really, not BS-ing.)
The District has to set curriculum priorities and those will lead to space re-allocations and equipment relevant to the tasks at hand.
This -- and of this I am absolutely convinced is true -- will help many of our students who find traditional education a crashing bore to get engaged. Study after study shows that when kids get engaged in these kids of activities their overall academic performance goes up, not down. That's what administrators get paid to do -- make decisions to get the District on the right path.
Achieve's Night of a Hundred Dinners and the Maker Madness, the demand for courses in robotics, the tremendous interest in things tech by the parents of kids in the District is testimony to the underlying demand for this curriculum change. The original post in this thread worried about jobs for our kids. Well, if we don;t at least give the kids the option of learning about this stuff then we can have a self-fulling prophecy of kids going on to college, have little in the way of tech knowledge or coding and then finding that they have to pay back their loans from diminished salaries. At least give the kids exposure to this stuff and let those who thrive in these areas take these courses.
Great. And once we develop robots that commit crimes, engage in vandalism and terrorism, what will the armies of young people left jobless by robots do?
But, I agree with Jude in that we have to prepare our young people to be masters of the machines.
I'm not advocating closing our eyes and ears to robotics, and I'm not suggesting that we don't pursue the technology. But as a society, we are going to have to figure out how people can make a living wage if they're not the owners of the fleets of robots.
Quite Unpredictably, I agree w/ everything Jude has said on this thread.
About "Good Paying Jobs". I think this is where our irrational fear of deflation comes into play. If robots are going to manufacture goods, prices should start to fall. Much like our outsourcing of jobs to China, etc. should have resulted in deflation, absent central bank intervention, so should the transition to automated productivity.
TylerDurden said:
Quite Unpredictably, I agree w/ everything Jude has said on this thread.
About "Good Paying Jobs". I think this is where our irrational fear of deflation comes into play. If robots are going to manufacture goods, prices should start to fall. Much like our outsourcing of jobs to China, etc. should have resulted in deflation, absent central bank intervention, so should the transition to automated productivity.
I sense that MOL is having a subversive affect on your libertarian spirit.
Automation leads to move creativity. We are losing low paying menial jobs and gaining other advantages - more freedom. What we need then is a more educated society, a real living wage for all jobs since robots will be doing all the work.
What those jobs in the future will be, I cannot say. Go back to the era of the Luddites and they were not particularly good at forecasting the future -- lots of jobs were created using the fruits of factory production.
Before robots put us all on the sidelines one might think about what is creative and what is repetitive, what requires working in a "drone-like" fashion and what requires creativity.
Here's an article on a version of a robot, an autonomous truck: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/worlds-first-autonomous-truck-goes-operation-n354511
The autonomous vehicle industry will encompass cars, trucks, buses, taxis, commuter trains and even airplanes (which are largely autonomous except when a pilot decides to kill himself and his passengers as with GermanWings.) That may mean less skilled drivers over time but also less accidents. Right now we kill somewhere around 35,000 to 40,000 people year in car wrecks and hundreds of thousands of people are injured. Once the fleet is autonomous these deaths will plummet saving over a course of a human lifetime several million lives, eliminating many millions of injuries, saving hundreds of billions in medical bills and property damages and a sharp reduction in auto insurance rates. Is that good or bad? Will jobs be lost? Yes. Will other jobs be created in engineering, software, logistics, re-doing the very basic transportation infrastructure? Yes.
New tech has spawned millions of jobs at companies led by Apple and Google and Microsoft. Tech eliminated jobs at call centers and secretarial jobs and many other fields while creating millions of jobs in the tech industry. Computer industry has allowed for space travel and orbital satellites doing astronomy and rovers crawling over Mars. All new jobs.
Yes, these require training but so what? We have to deal with the world as it is handed to us, shape it to our own ends without destroying it (climate change as an example). For example, we no longer teach in the overwhelming majority of schools how to farm or take care of horses or cattle. Farming in the West is largely automated employing vastly fewer people producing vastly more food. One can bemoan this but very few people are going to go back and live on farms. Technology changed farming -- for better or worse one can argue passionately about, but it did change it.
I am not worried at all about the future except for one thing: we are not training our kids with the proper skill sets to survive economically in this world. They can;t go into the work force ignorant of the technology and economics they must contend with. Simply texting and using social media does not make one tech savvy. We all drive cars and our knowledge of what goes on inside a car is pitiful. There were times when many more people knew about the innards of cars; now very few do. Is that bad or good? Are we car savvy because we drive one? Hardly. If we were we wouldn't kill 35,000-40,000 people per year.
hoops said:
TylerDurden said:
Quite Unpredictably, I agree w/ everything Jude has said on this thread.
About "Good Paying Jobs". I think this is where our irrational fear of deflation comes into play. If robots are going to manufacture goods, prices should start to fall. Much like our outsourcing of jobs to China, etc. should have resulted in deflation, absent central bank intervention, so should the transition to automated productivity.
I sense that MOL is having a subversive affect on your libertarian spirit.
Automation leads to move creativity. We are losing low paying menial jobs and gaining other advantages - more freedom. What we need then is a more educated society, a real living wage for all jobs since robots will be doing all the work.
What I'm saying is that the benefit to society of robots "doing the work" where that makes sense is that productivity increases. This results in lower prices...all else being equal.
If a job pays more than the cost of capital to replace it with automation the job will go away.
But the leftist-statist-union axis had degraded the quality of education available to children in poor areas, fought the providing of other options and fostered a culture that makes those diligently seeking education outcasts to be bullied into submission.
ramzzoinksus said:
If a job pays more than the cost of capital to replace it with automation the job will go away.
But the leftist-statist-union axis had degraded the quality of education available to children in poor areas, fought the providing of other options and fostered a culture that makes those diligently seeking education outcasts to be bullied into submission.
I'm pretty sure that a robot could write your posts.
From a well-known futurist:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby.
Shoot. I could program a robot to repeat "Statist!" over and over and I was an English major.
My favorite is the repeated idea that public schools are the problem...and this from the guy who lives where publics might as well be privates for all the attention kids get.
They could be everywhere if the unions did not prevent it. Parents in places like Millburn have the juice to prevent unions from applying their mediocritising magic that parents elsewhere do not.
ramzzoinksus said:
They could be everywhere if the unions did not prevent it. Parents in places like Millburn have the juice to prevent unions from applying their mediocritising magic that parents elsewhere do not.
Oh b.s. Millburn is swimming in money. And the ratio of kids without IEPs to kids with IEPs or kids who need IEPs is much more favorable in districts like Millburn than, say, Irvington. That makes things so much easier for the schools.
Unions have nothing to do with it.
What are you saying? That there are fewer or more IEP's in Millburn? Because IEP's run like water in Millburn. They are hardly rare.
I'm amazed that someone could look at the overall performance of our public schools & say that they are not the problem. The fact that places like Millburn have such good schools and places like Baltimore/Newark have by and large failing schools is exactly what Public schools were supposedly meant to solve.
By any objective measure our Public School system is a failure.
ramzzoinksus said:
What are you saying? That there are fewer or more IEP's in Millburn? Because IEP's run like water in Millburn. They are hardly rare.
I am saying that the number of kids in, say, Irvington who are in need of IEPs is much higher than in Millburn. Now, in Millburn, of course, parents know how to fight for their IEPs more effectively than in Irvington so the numbers won't reveal the reality.
TylerDurden said:
I'm amazed that someone could look at the overall performance of our public schools & say that they are not the problem. The fact that places like Millburn have such good schools and places like Baltimore/Newark have by and large failing schools is exactly what Public schools were supposedly meant to solve.
By any objective measure our Public School system is a failure.
Unless the cause of the problems is outside of the the schools - broken neighborhoods. Kids without hope. etc., etc.
I would say that by any objective measure, public education is not being supported sufficiently to allow for success.
or necessarily valued enough by the very people its meant to help, to allow for success.
So much for China's advantage being cheap labor. This is the world that is coming.
Building work starts on first all-robot manufacturing plant in China’s Dongguan"Construction work has begun on the first factory in China’s manufacturing hub of Dongguan to use only robots for production, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
A total of 1,000 robots would be introduced at the factory initially, run by Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co, with the aim of reducing the current workforce of 1,800 by 90 per cent to only about 200, Chen Xingqi, the chairman of the company’s board, was quoted as saying in the report."
http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/building-work-starts-first-all-robot-manufacturing-plant-chinas