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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sense who wrote (281189)	10/7/2014 2:39:39 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Let's talk about this in a bit more detail. "Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," That is only about 10 years from now. The point I was alluding to in my post was what will we do once the majority of the population is unnecessary. This is a very important consideration for the society and policy makers. Either we will become a socialistic welfare state, or we will have to forcefully reduce our population (and I don't think many people have the stomach to see the latter). There are 4 important factors to consider: (1) The purpose of technology is to eliminate jobs (a.k.a increase productivity). For example, flying from one coast to the other considerably reduces the number of jobs that would have required moving the same number of people by car (think of how many drivers, mechanics, gas stations, etc would be needed if you had to drive instead of flying). Similarly there was a time that every manager had a secretary who'd get his messages and would type his letters for him and managed his calendar. These days we all send our own emails and use Outlook or some other electronic calendar, to say nothing of the voicemail that has removed the need for secretary taking messages. As a result legions of typists and administrative support staff have been let go. So the Gartner maybe underestimating the trend. (2) The pace of technological innovation has been increasing - almost since the beginning of time. Think about how long it took to figure out how to melt metals or to figure out the atomic structure of the elements. Now start googling how many new materials (or even new elements) are created over the past few decade. There is no reason to expect that the pace of advancement will not accelerate further and stay at the current rate. (3) Our needs and wants don't grow as fast as the technology. Yes, I know the mantra about never having enough or always wanting the latest gizmo. But that only holds when the prices are cheap and I have nothing better to do with my money. I can't remember the last time that I upgraded my PC because it could not do what I needed it to do. I only change it because something in it dies and repairing costs about the same as replacement. The same goes for my cell phone. I'll be buying a new top of the line cell phone soon, but only because my older cell phone has been dropped too many times and its battery doesn't hold charge as well. This is an indulgence I am making because I have enough income that the difference in costs between repair and purchase is insignificant to me. The main point here is that if I was out of work, or if the cost differential was too big, I would keep my old phone because it does all that I need it to do very well. (4) ICT removes the time and space barriers. This is a critical change compared to previous eras because now prosperity and wealth effect is not localized to the source (in other words, cities can be drained of their wealth...at least partially). It also means that automation no longer removes lower end jobs. Now your typical radiologist or programmer has to compete with someone far away (sometime way way far away). What is more, the technology itself is advancing in ways that is approaching and sometimes exceeding human capacity. For example, for eons object recognition was something that humans did well and computers could not do. So the best that ICT had to offer businesses was crowdsourcing of image categorization (e.g. Amazon's Mechanical Turk). Not anymore. In recent years computers have been able to outperform the average user and are now less than 2% worse than a trained human. And these are your average computers. Advanced ones, like IBM's Watson, can outdo most doctors and paralegals in their respective fields. When I put these 4 together, I see the challenges over the next decade or two looking like the challenges that face Detroit. Too many out of work population that is not able to purchase enough goods and services to maintain a functioning economy. And the answers will be similar: get rid of the population, tear down the buildings, and give enough grants to whoever that is left over to prevent riots and minimally keep the economy moving. This is very bad news for "Conservatives". They are getting hit with both the demographic and technological trends. If GOP was stock, I'd be shorting it big time. Not that Dems are any better. As you said, both parties are the same crap. But DNC is better positioned to ride the trend.