Moving to the purpose of this thread, the financial crash of 2001 and beyond.
The recent French Riots were in my opinion the first scrimmage of the coming world wide class war.
Being an atheist I put little store in the bible other than it is a great collection of the knowledge of the ages, from a poetic description of nebular collapse to the advent of man, to great advice on raising children, (spare the rod and spoil the child), as well as a pretty good idea on how to get along (treat your neighbor as your self).
I am however often baffled by some biblical prophesy.
Armageddon is one ara that worries me. I think it describes well what seems inevitable. Automation and computers continue to eliminate work, eventually they will eliminate all jobs. The owners won't give up what they opwn, the riff raff will refuse to starve. Result Class war.
as examples:
In 1700 approximately 98% of the population of the world was involved the production of food. By 1860 only 80% of the workforce of America was involved in the production of food.
By 1960 agriculture involved 16% of the population. Today less than 2% of the population (counting illegal aliens - More on them later) works in the farming/food industry.
In 1860 16% of the working population was involved in manufacturing. By 1960 40% of the US working population was involved in Manufacturing, today we are back to 16$.
The current edition of Scientific American has an article "Innovations from a Robot Ralley. It describes the recent DARPA sponsored desert cross country race. Net result - 23 Robots entered (SUVs Hummers, custombuilt, etc. the course 132 miles of desert backroads, canyons, obstacles, etc.
course guidance 2935 GPS points. No guidance or communication with any human for the course of the race the winner of the $2,000,000 prize ran the course in under 7 hours.
GPS guidance of farm implements is at a point that for approximately $50,000 a tractor can be outfited with a system that:
Can plow, disk, harrow, plant, fertilize, cultivate, and harvest autonomously, sans OSHA regulations that don't allow it.
Is 20% more efficient in underlap and overlap saving greatly on wasted land, wasted seed, and wasted fertilizer.
Can cultivate to within 1 centimeter of the crop without ever hitting a plant because of the precision of planting and cultivation.
Can sample soil as it moves sending data on what needs fertilizer and what doesn't/
It is possible today for a farmer to never leave his office, never look at his fields, and grow bumper crops not possible just a few years ago.
Everyone on this thread is familiar with computers, consider doing stock research in 1980, you would have had to go to a large brokerage, use library reading reports, books, magazines, etc. for days to find one new stock of interest to you. Today you can bring up an Internet site with a stock search program, key in parameters that meet your criteria, and in seconds have a list of many stocks to chose from.
to research anything took a trip to the library, hours of searching, today we google it and have results in again seconds.
These same benefits are available in the office. Far more information is available, reams and reams, than then, and it is instantaneously available.
Marking up copy is now a matter of quickly building a page on a computer.
These and an almost limitless list of other advances effect the office jobs that could not be done can now be done by an intern.
Science and technology march on.
IBM last year introduced ASCI Purple which approximately matches the processing power of the human brain, it has since introduced Blue Gene eServer which slightly exceeds the data processing of the human brain, and finally Blue Gene/L which exceeds the data processing power of the human mind by a factor of approximately 3 - 280.6 TeraFlops. 280,600,000,000,000 floating point operations per seconds (read that as multiplies per second) relate that to Watershed Week, the second week of July 1967 when the installed base of computers world wide matched the math processing power of the human race. BTW the desk top you are reading this on far far exceeds the math processing speed of the human race.
Blue Gene/L will be on your desktop in 10-15 years. It will cost mere hundreds of dollars, and will terabytes of storage.
Microsoft and others work on Natural Language Processing. Just talk to your computer and it talks back to you.
Self programming is rapidly evolving, key in few parameters and the computer will write the program.
Combine the above and say "Hey Jim" (Your Computers Name), "write a letter for publication on SI, include the top 500 list, enumerate the past 10 years of farming automation advances, project the curve for computer speed, etc. show where jobs are going for humans. You know my writting style. Let me proof it and then you can post it on the Financial Collapse of 2001 and beyond thread"
Poof you have the copy, say "Ok Jim" and guess what I might be reading what you just presented.
With instant search from voice command for any data about your business, or the world why would you need a secretary other than to bring you coffee. As far as that goes why would you need a research staff, payroll department, with instant communications with your customers computer to computer why would you need an accounting department, with autonomous communication with your customers computers why would you need a sales force. Intel is presently building a couple of new fabs, they will be "lights out" no one on the production floor, perhaps a few technicians at computer consoles in the control room overseeing the operations of the production equipment to send maintenance to clear any problem that might develop, in 15 years you may send a robot.
The only jobs left will be Service, I like my hair cut by a sweet young thing that likes to cut my hair on the far side of my head necessitating placing against her bosom. To hell with a computer there. I like my coffee served by a waitress. etc. The question however is where will I earn the money to pay the barber or the waitress.
Where will you earn your money then?
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