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Demography and Destiny
- tuatoru 5y agoTLDR: this guy has finally noticed that working-age population is declining and asserts that automation will be along to fix everything. To me the most notable thing about automation is the sheer amount of labour required to create it. The sceond most notable thing is how limited the effects are. I've been reading about efforts to produce self-driving vehicles for at least a decade, and in that time probably millions to tens of millions of working years have been invested in developing them. The article talks about "flexible robots" that can stack warehouse shelves, or weld steel, or pick fruit, or make salads. Disappointingly, there is no such thing. A robot that can harvest apples cannot be redeployed to harvest grapes, or even to prune apple trees correctly, let alone to stack shelves or make salads. Every single task requires its own labour-intensive automation program. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of millions of tasks in a modern economy. We'll be here a while.