Smart robots will take over a third of jobs by 2025, Gartner says

The entire argument above can be summarised as the Luddite Fallacy, but the debate has moved on and the reality of the situation is that this is now viewed as overly simplistic and applies to an economic reality that is rapidly receding into our past.

The debate, along with the world economy and potential impact of technology, has become far more complex.

If you have any doubt, read this recent article in The Economist. It covers a number of issues from the perspective of developing economies where automation is now becoming more affordable than even the lowest paid workers.

Arrested development
The model of development through industrialisation is on its way out
Oct 4th 2014
http://www.economist.com/news/speci...trialisation-its-way-out-arrested-development
 
And more specifically on technological advances increasingly making old arguments obsolete:

Fear of the job-destroying effects of technology is as old as industrialisation. It is often branded as the lump-of-labour fallacy: the belief that there is only so much work to go round (the lump), so that if machines (or foreigners) do more of it, less is left for others. This is deemed a fallacy because as technology displaces workers from a particular occupation it enriches others, who spend their gains on goods and services that create new employment for the workers whose jobs have been automated away. A critical cog in the re-employment machine, though, is pay. To clear a glutted market, prices must fall, and that applies to labour as much as to wheat or cars.

Where labour is cheap, firms use more of it. Carmakers in Europe and Japan, where it is expensive, use many more industrial robots than in emerging countries, though China is beginning to invest heavily in robots as its labour costs rise. In Britain a bout of high inflation caused real wages to tumble between 2007 and 2013. Some economists see this as an explanation for the unusual shape of the country's recovery, with employment holding up well but productivity and GDP performing abysmally.

Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labour. In 1900 some 40% of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural employment in most rich countries to below 5%, and food costs dropped steeply. But in those days excess labour was relatively easily reallocated to new sectors, thanks in large part to investment in education. That is becoming more difficult. In America the share of the population with a university degree has been more or less flat since the 1990s. In other rich economies the proportion of young people going into tertiary education has gone up, but few have managed to boost it much beyond the American level.

At the same time technological advances are encroaching on tasks that were previously considered too brainy to be automated, including some legal and accounting work. In those fields people at the top of their profession will in future attract many more clients and higher fees, but white-collar workers with lower qualifications will find themselves displaced and may in turn displace others with even lesser skills.

http://www.economist.com/news/speci...il-its-promise-higher-productivity-and-better
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'Boris' the robot can load up your dishwasher

'Boris' the robot was shown off at the British Science Festival today as an one of the first robots to be able to work out how to pick up unfamiliar objects in a human like fashion. Previously, robots could only pick up objects of a fixed size in a fixed location, however, Boris can intelligently work out how to pick up objects it has never been put in front of before.

"The scenario that we've got is to get the robot to load a dishwasher. That's not because I think that dishwasher-loading robots are an economic, social necessity right now. It's because it encapsulates an incredibly hard range of general manipulation tasks," he said.

"Once you can crack that, once you can manipulate an object that you've never seen before, you can do a whole bunch of different things."

It comes with humanlike hands and aluminium arms and although loading a dishwasher may seem like a mundane challenge to accomplish, it opens up doors to uses in a broad range of areas in industry and other sectors like surgery. The robot can learn new grips and test out previously learned grips on familiar looking objects.

qdpBq9I.jpg


http://interestingengineering.com/boris-the-robot-can-load-up-your-dishwasher/
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I'd like to see a vid of boris in action I bet it takes him an hour to load the dishwasher .

Menial tasks are where robots fall in a heap their dexterity is terrible . .Like the robots u see climbing ladders ...looks they are on drugs . .

There will ALWAYs be a place for humans no matter how good robots are . Firstly not everyone can afford a robot & if u have one for a housekeeper you cant kiss it :lol: well u can if your a WEIRDO !!
 
SilverPete said:
The entire argument above can be summarised as the Luddite Fallacy, but the debate has moved on and the reality of the situation is that this is now viewed as overly simplistic and applies to an economic reality that is rapidly receding into our past.

The debate, along with the world economy and potential impact of technology, has become far more complex.

If you have any doubt, read this recent article in The Economist. It covers a number of issues from the perspective of developing economies where automation is now becoming more affordable than even the lowest paid workers.

Arrested development
The model of development through industrialisation is on its way out
Oct 4th 2014
http://www.economist.com/news/speci...trialisation-its-way-out-arrested-development
Click to expand...
Yes. this time is different :rolleyes:

Either robots replace humanity and humans are extinct or they are simply a continuation of historical productivity improvements.

The use of robots does not exist in a vacuum. They are specifically used to produce output. But where is that output going? To consumers. More output per person means more consumption per person. As Hawkeye already discussed, one of the key areas where the additional consumption is absorbed is in our leisure time. This has been a substantial part of the whole process. As I posted: "In 1840 an operative in the cotton mills of Rhode Island, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, turned off 9,600 yards of standard sheeting in a year; in 1886 the operative in the same mill made about 30,000 yards, working ten hours a day. In 1840 the wages were $176 a year; in 1886 the wages were $285 a year." And before you raise "but how will they be distributed?" the answer is simply "in exactly the same way the production of current factories are distributed - by trade for mutually beneficial outcomes". A factory owner not trading their products is no different to you not trading the products of your home cooking or arts and crafts. If there are people who are not engaged in the robot economy their demand or ability to produce things doesn't magically disappear. They can continue operating in a non-robot economy and there's no real difference compared to now.
 
SilverPete said:
^^^ Arguments from the 1800's are not necessarily relevant today. The old arguments are being reexamined in light of current economic and technological reality. There is genuine debate in this area now:

The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

Our livelihoods are set for technological upheaval
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Yes. This time it's different :rolleyes:

The laws of economics are just as relevant today as they were 5,000 years ago. They haven't changed. Say's Law reigned then, reigns now and will always reign.

Say you are the lucky factory owner that can produce 10,000 pairs of shoes a day for $1 each using nothing but robots (and some purchased materials) in the entire factory. Well then what? You sure as heck do not want 10,000 pairs of shoes a day nor could you actually consume such. They will be traded away to other people for the other things that you want. Multiply this by the tens of thousands of products that we have and that is the economy. In the extreme, think Jetsons or Futurama style "working" for the abundance of things they consume.
 
The only way a robot factory owner can undercut competition is by offering their products to the market. If they don't offer them then there is essentially no impact of the robots on people's livelihoods as the labour-using competition is still in existence. If they do offer them, then there is increased production.
 
8
SilverPete said:
^^^ The onrushing wave: Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change
http://www.economist.com/news/brief...s-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less
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Can't read it as I've reached my daily limit, but the title itself is wrong. Innovation hasn't "delivered more long-run employment", long-run employment continues despite innovation. Cutting and pasting from one of the previous threads on this topic

bordsilver said:
...this is an old sophism. I suggest you read things like:

Bastiat

and

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/24/race-against-the-machine/

For short counters to this line of thought.

Edit: And the punch line:
Bastiat said:
To get at the root of this sophism it is necessary only to reflect that human labor is not the end, but the means. It never remains unemployed. If one obstacle is removed, it does battle with another; and society is freed from two obstacles by the same amount of labor that was formerly required for the removal of one. If the labor of the cooper is rendered unnecessary in one department, it will soon take another direction. But how and from what source will it be remunerated? From the same source exactly from which it is remunerated at present; for when a certain amount of labor becomes disposable by the removal of an obstacle, a corresponding amount of remuneration becomes disposable also. To maintain that human labor will ever come to want employment, would be to maintain that the human race will cease to encounter obstacles. In that case labor would not only be impossible; it would be superfluous. We should no longer have anything to do, because we should be omnipotent; and we should only have to pronounce our fiat in order to ensure the satisfaction of all our desires and the supply of all our wants.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

If we are at the point of becoming god's whose wants can be satisfied by automation, then sweet, there's no need for anyone to work.

But re-iterating: "The only way a robot factory owner can undercut competition is by offering their products to the market. If they don't offer them then there is essentially no impact of the robots on people's livelihoods as the labour-using competition is still in existence." This is undeniable. There is no problem that requires "policy planning" but there will be many opportunities for people to exploit to aid the ongoing transition. As always, the biggest barriers will be regulations that ban people from adapting.
 
Robots cannot be less limited and smarter than their software writers and users.
If 33% jobs get wiped instead of replaced, then it won't be due to robots, but due to the theft committed by the lazybutters, including governments.
Does this smell abit more as reality?
 
Pirocco said:
Robots cannot be less limited and smarter than their software writers and users.
If 33% jobs get wiped instead of replaced, then it won't be due to robots, but due to the theft committed by the lazybutters, including governments.
Does this smell abit more as reality?
Click to expand...

Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that can travel faster than humans? Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that is stronger than humans? Is it impossible to build a machine that is smarter than humans?

It is a mistake to assume that machine intelligence will always be limited by the rules and knowledge the designer encoded a priori like a large program of if-then-else statements.

The field of machine learning covers systems that are not limited in such a way.
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and statistics that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions. Besides CS and Statistics, it has strong ties to artificial intelligence and optimization, which deliver both methods and theory to the field. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit, rule-based algorithms is infeasible. Example applications include spam filtering, optical character recognition (OCR),[1] search engines and computer vision. Machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition are sometimes conflated.
Click to expand...

Will it be incredibly difficult? Yes. But impossible? No.
 
hal-9000-dave-im-afraid-i-cant-let-you-do-that-sad-hill-news.jpg

Source: 2001: A Space Oddessy

I hope sentient robots don't become intergalactic people smugglers.
 
SilverPete said:
Pirocco said:
Robots cannot be less limited and smarter than their software writers and users.
If 33% jobs get wiped instead of replaced, then it won't be due to robots, but due to the theft committed by the lazybutters, including governments.
Does this smell abit more as reality?
Click to expand...

Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that can travel faster than humans? Is it impossible for humans to build a machine that is stronger than humans? Is it impossible to build a machine that is smarter than humans?
Click to expand...
I talk about the "thinking" of robots, not about mechanical speed and whatever.
Smartness sits in the brain not in the legs. Your next sentence doesn't read different so why this sentence?
SilverPete said:
It is a mistake to assume that machine intelligence will always be limited by the rules and knowledge the designer encoded a priori like a large program of if-then-else statements.
Click to expand...
It's not about rules.
It's not about knowledge.
It's not about size of programs.
It's about thinking, solving the wide variety of problems that nature / circumstances can pose.
See, the world is not a totally predefined sandbox environment.
It's a big and complex interaction of numerous processes, resulting in situations in a wide variety.
For a robot to achieve the same abilities as a human, it would need to become a human, with some things blocked in the mind to prevent it going against its maker or so. :P

SilverPete said:
The field of machine learning covers systems that are not limited in such a way.
Machine learning is a subfield of computer science and statistics that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions. Besides CS and Statistics, it has strong ties to artificial intelligence and optimization, which deliver both methods and theory to the field. Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit, rule-based algorithms is infeasible. Example applications include spam filtering, optical character recognition (OCR),[1] search engines and computer vision. Machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition are sometimes conflated.
Click to expand...

Will it be incredibly difficult? Yes. But impossible? No.
Click to expand...
Of course it's not impossible. Fuck with a woman, wait some years, and you have a productive entity that can do way more than your Universal Robot, IF it wants. :P
 
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