3 ms·

There is a limit to how many people can be trained to do skilled labor though. We may like to imagine that everyone could, given the opportunity, do "skilled l

There is a limit to how many people can be trained to do skilled labor though. We may like to imagine that everyone could, given the opportunity, do "skilled labor", but reality will be that automation will continue to slide the bar up as to how talented a person needs to be to be better than their automated replacement. Right now, maybe less than 1 percent of the population can't do something better than a machine could. Fast forward 50 or 100 years, and maybe half the population genuinely cannot do anything that a machine couldn't do better.

timwiseman 17y ago
I both hope and sincerely think you are wrong. People improve with practice. Give them enough training to get that practice and they will improve. Yes, the bar of what the machines can do is high, and rising, but there are a lot of things they will not be able to do for the forseeable future such as program, write, do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce. At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for.
- moe 17y ago
  do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce These are purely rule-based, mechnical tasks. I would say those are among the first to go into robot hands. At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for. Well, immediate future is a relative term. Looking at what Asimo and other robotics projects can do today I very much expect the robots of 2050 to be capable of performing around 90% of all jobs better than a human. There simply isn't much creativity or "humanity" involved in most jobs.
  - kiba 17y ago
    Sometime the only way to beat the machine is to join them. So that mean becoming a cyborg and improving our brain with mechanical brain cells and exploiting our natural parallel computing capacity. We just need a programming language and interface/translation machinery and firmware to take advantage of these natural CPUs.
    - timwiseman 17y ago
      An interesting thought, and we may eventually move that way, but I suspect we are a long way off from that.
    - extension 17y ago
      In order to beat machines at being employed, the special cybernetic ability you would need is "working for free".
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    Repairs generally are not mechanical or rule based, depending on the complexity of the system involved of course. Picking heads of lettuce is, but there is no robot on the horizon capable of doing it without destroying them.

timwiseman 17y ago

I both hope and sincerely think you are wrong. People improve with practice. Give them enough training to get that practice and they will improve. Yes, the bar of what the machines can do is high, and rising, but there are a lot of things they will not be able to do for the forseeable future such as program, write, do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce. At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for.

moe 17y ago
do most repairs, or pick heads of lettuce These are purely rule-based, mechnical tasks. I would say those are among the first to go into robot hands. At least for the immediate future, anything that is not repetitive and fixed in task will be hard to automate, but relatively easy to train a normal person for. Well, immediate future is a relative term. Looking at what Asimo and other robotics projects can do today I very much expect the robots of 2050 to be capable of performing around 90% of all jobs better than a human. There simply isn't much creativity or "humanity" involved in most jobs.
- kiba 17y ago
  Sometime the only way to beat the machine is to join them. So that mean becoming a cyborg and improving our brain with mechanical brain cells and exploiting our natural parallel computing capacity. We just need a programming language and interface/translation machinery and firmware to take advantage of these natural CPUs.
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    An interesting thought, and we may eventually move that way, but I suspect we are a long way off from that.
  - extension 17y ago
    In order to beat machines at being employed, the special cybernetic ability you would need is "working for free".
- timwiseman 17y ago
  Repairs generally are not mechanical or rule based, depending on the complexity of the system involved of course. Picking heads of lettuce is, but there is no robot on the horizon capable of doing it without destroying them.