Inevitable mass unemployment? The number of people on this planet is increasing faster than new opportunities are being created to replace the increasing automation of existing jobs. Bill Gates: People Don't Realise How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots Big changes are coming to the labour market that people and governments aren't prepared for, Bill Gates believes. Speaking at Washington, D.C., economic think tank The American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Gates said than within 20 years, a lot of jobs will go away, replaced by software automation ("bots" in tech slang, though Gates used the term "software substitution"). http://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-away-jobs-2014-3
It's not just low level jobs which are going to be lost as well. http://www.smh.com.au/business/why-an-algorithm-wants-your-highly-skilled-job-20140120-31454.html "If you think your job is safe, think again. Advances in technology mean that even highly educated workers will begin to feel the pinch of the digital revolution, with close to half of US jobs at risk of 'computerisation' on the next 20 years. Machines and computer programs have always taken routine and repetitive tasks from the employment market, but increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence could result in a new wave of job losses." Oh well I guess the 1% will be hiring extra security to keep the hungry hoards at bay !!
What happens when all the unemployed workers are so poor they cannot buy anything anymore? The most important person in any business is the customer, and if they go the business goes. JMO OC
There is an alternate universe where everyone would be welcoming new technology, I mean common sense (our jobs are easier and more products to go around) The problem still is Central Banking and an Expanding Government and not new technology, new technology aids us all With no Central Bank, a small and constitutionally restricted government, minimal regulation, no minimum wages we would have near 100% employment all the time. Also we would all only be working 2-3 days a week and have more purchasing power than we do now. New robotics and automation would see the middle income earner move down to maybe 1-2 days a week work and earning more. The problem of diminishing employment levels is not a direct result of robotic automation, rather just a symptom caused by our current finance and government structure. Interest on factitious perpetual debt sided with an ever expanding incompetent government is what is confiscating the benefits of ingenuity and scare resources. Think of a small society on a deserted Island, are they better off working 7 days a week to live or with a factory that could produce enough food, clothing and goods for them.
Security robots. No need to hire people. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0VgrSSlGoo[/youtube]
I imagine, at some point, that a vast bulk of people will not be able to afford all these automation technologies so a shadow employment & financial system could develop where they employ each other and use an alternate monetary system for payment. But, what if the government doesn't allow that and criminalises such citizen-driven activity?
All this 'new technology' has come to the fore because the employer has seen that his workers have become ever more unaffordable. A machine does not take holidays or sick leave or demand long service leave or ever increasing wages. But as I pointed out, the unemployed worker does not buy much. ...and now a man gets a job as a 'part time casual', simply because the employer needs to have a good look at him before he offers him a permanent job. You can thank the unions for that situation. In 1955 a small country bank branch had none of these new fangled "adding machines", it was all done in your head with nib pen and ink! Now computers do it! OC
I think some people miss the point of a job it's not a 'right' to have a job it's just a contractual arrangement to trade your time and labour for trade units that can be exchanged with others producing different goods and services. There is always the demand for more employees, a business would employ everyone they could and bid up the wages if feasible to do so, the fiat system, government and regulations prevent this. If a factory replaced all it's workers with robots then in the ideal world new jobs would instantly be created to replace those, repair and maintenance of robots, alternative service jobs that would better everyone lives. If you look at jobs as just a job and don't consider how automation 'should' better our lives then lets just pass new legislation that all miners in Australia must only dig with spoons, then we would have 100% employment tomorrow as it would take every Australian digging with spoons to mine anything.
You didn't have a Burroughs adding machine? After I left the PMG in 1977, I joined Burroughs computers. They were still servicing them.
I think the point is that the impact of rapid structural changes to the labour market that will be brought about by increasingly sophisticated and affordable automation technologies has not really hit people's radar yet. How will it impact tax revenues? Social security? Developing nations whose advantage is low cost labour?
In Yarrawonga, we had NOTHING! Just the old nib pen and an ink well, and 'blotter'. I saw my first 'adding machine' in Moorabbin in late 1955. Lord knows what make it was. The first 'ledger machine' probably 3 or 4 years after that. When I was a ledger-keeper' they were bound leather volumes about 24" high and 18" wide and about 500 pages thick. Beautiful Copperplate headings, and NIL mistakes in the columns. I was quite proud of them. OC
This is actually very deep and hits the nail on the head. Production must be distributed somehow. If people don't have jobs then there won't be the production. It's the circle of life that is the economy. People will still have needs and will still need them to be met so the massive productivity improvements will just result in anyone engaged in the economy to simply obtain more for less work. Businesses that produce goods that consumers cannot afford to buy simply do not survive. If businesses produce these goods without people then they simply won't be produced. (The exception of course is when we have true AI and the robots create their own economy where they are producing for themselves and humans go the way of the dodo.)
The ones with the hunting down of waddling overweight flightless humans by the nimble robot predators are the best
Technology such as this is directed and created through central banking. The people who own it and direct it through their elite prism would not us people to keep around. http://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years/ The system we have cannot continue if and when it fails everything it has touched could change, corporations, banking, industry, research, military - what then we become simple farmers and survivalists? What we have in terms of trade and structure would cease to exist but how would that break down? And affect local communities? And cities themselves. Either that or the system we have could become more and more centralized to world governance. Anyone here lived in East Germany or Post Soviet Russia? :|
A good read/listen on the subject. http://www.scribd.com/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money-Guilt-and-the-Machine [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDY74nLuLg[/youtube]
