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The only thing I cannot wrap my head around is why we won't create new jobs. Are we truly months away from reaching the pinnacle of human achievement? We've qu
by randomdata 9y ago
The only thing I cannot wrap my head around is why we won't create new jobs. Are we truly months away from reaching the pinnacle of human achievement?
We've quite literally lost 95% of all jobs before. That part is nothing new. However, what we found was that when people were jobless and bored, they found new things to do. Things that nobody ever imagined people doing when they were busying doing other jobs.
It is not like human-level robots are anywhere on the horizon. At best we have simple pattern matching machines that can be trained to do certain tasks. But they cannot cross tasks. A self-driving car robot cannot start becoming a self-practicing doctor robot on a whim. A self-practicing doctor requires building an entirely new robot specialized to do medicine.
Up to this point, each time we lose jobs, the new jobs people invent have become more and more diverse. At one time, 95% of the workforce all did the same job. Now the largest industry employs something like 5% of the workforce. The numbers are getting smaller. And are trending to be even smaller still. It is not difficult to imagine a time when people will all have distinct jobs, that no other human does. The economies of building a robot to replace a single person starts to diminish quickly.
- CodeCube 9y agoThe problem is how easily the workforce will be able to adapt to these new jobs. It's one thing to have new repetitive manufacturing jobs invented (as with the industrial revolution), and quite another for a growing market of engineers (electrical, mechanical, software, etc).
- Density 9y agoWe don't need any more engineers. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-jobs-industry-careers.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-...
- notfromhere 9y agoThe industrial revolution replaced physical laborers, the information revolution will replace mental labor. If both physical and mental labor is replaced by machines, and you're an average or below average individual, what decent career prospects will you have?
- randomdata 9y agoEvery job has a physical and mental component, so it is difficult to determine exactly where you are drawing the line. But if we say that a mental job is one that is done primarily sitting at a desk, I would suggest that the majority of jobs still fall under the physical labor classification. In fact, the agriculture sector alone, which the industrial revolution changed more than any other, is still about the same size as the entire information sector. To dig deeper: If we look at the fastest growing jobs, according to the BLS, there are very few on the list that are not primarily physical jobs. Of the top 10, there are only three that I would consider as being more mental than physical. If this is what a post-industrial revolution that replaced physical laborers looks like, I'm not sure why we're worried about some future information revolution. And that's without even accounting for the fact that the information industry itself is tiny.
- notfromhere 9y agoi don't think job growth really matters so much as wages. Automation has had a pretty clear impact on middle class wages, while high-level and low-level wage jobs have continued to grow
- sp332 9y agoJust because it worked once or twice doesn't mean it's going to work forever.