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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (216505)	2/9/2013 11:30:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542114

That's been the unjustified worry since the industrial revolution began. See Luddites: <The real problem is that the machines are replacing more and more of us all the time. > There is no shortage of useful things for people to do. When a machine does the hard work for us, those who were doing it can go on to do something else that machines are not yet doing. It's a wonderful process. When Google autocars [or other brands] replace the need to have a person drive a car, it will be a great day. Millions more people will be free to do something more useful. Mqurice

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (216505)	2/10/2013 1:28:59 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542114

"Not all of us are cut out to be knowledge gurus. We are going to have confront the fact that more and more of us will not be needed." Even the "knowledge gurus" are becoming superfluous. The "needed" professions in the future will be for jobs like repair plumbing, where it's truly difficult to create robots capable of performing the job. Robots like the thing below will take over the "knowledge professions". --------------------------------------------------- IBM's Watson to Start Dispensing Medical Advice IT TEAMS WITH BIG INSURER, HOSPITAL ON TWO APPS FOR DOCTORS, INSURERS By the Associated Press newser.com Posted Feb 8, 2013 6:09 PM CST (AP) – Dr. Watson is accepting new patients. The Watson supercomputer is graduating from its medical residency and is being offered commercially to doctors and health insurance companies. IBM, the health insurer WellPoint, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced two Watson-based applications—one to help assess treatments for lung cancer and one to help manage health insurance decisions and claims. Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database, and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best humanJeopardy! players on television two years ago. In both applications, doctors or insurance company workers will access Watson through a tablet or computer. Watson will compare a patient's medical records to what it has learned and make recommendations in decreasing order of confidence. In the cancer program, the computer will be considering what treatment is most likely to succeed. In the insurance program, it will consider what treatment should be authorized for payment. Watson has been trained in medicine through pilot programs at WellPoint and Sloan-Kettering. The lung cancer program is being adopted by two medical groups, the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in New York's Westchester County. WellPoint is already using the insurance application. It will be selling both applications and will compensate IBM under a deal between the firms.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (216505)	2/16/2013 3:39:16 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542114

Fortunately, even if we are on the pension, we are a lot better off than employed people 100 years ago. It is spectacularly fantastic how good life is. We are going to have confront the fact that more and more of us will not be needed. Only 20 years ago, it was only the well off who had cellphones. Now, unemployed people can afford them and the phones they have are amazingly powerful computers which are far far more powerful than computers of 20 years ago. People are needed, just not at the price they want. I could hire half a dozen but not at the prices they expect, and I don't want bad people. They need to be a bit on the civil side and partly polite. Swarms of people are becoming elderly and need a lot of care and attention. That's a lot of work that needs doing. There's a shortage of people to work, not a surplus. The problem is, people think they are worth more than they actually are. In the same way about 80% of people think they are better than average as drivers. No doubt the remaining 20% think they are as good as the average [or maybe actually think they are a bit better than average but like to be modest - also being above average in modesty as well as driving ability]. Mqurice