Brave "New" World

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Servant_, May 14, 2012.

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  1. Servant_ Registered Senior Member

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    Jobs are disappearing because technology is replacing them, slowly at first, but exponential in it's progression.

    There is no escaping this...

    Thus we come to the next big thing. The "universal remote" of the future is a nano sized quantum controller that has a "make my wish come true" button. We will "all" soon have quite a bit of time on our hands to pursue the next "Renaissance" following the ongoing next industrial revolution. (You won't get one though, your not on the approved buyers list.)
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    That's true. My job as Model Maker was replaced by my job as Digital Sculptor.
     
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  5. Gravage Registered Senior Member

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    Than we can expect another revolution, since people will lose jobs, they already are losing jobs.
     
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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Sounds like another Kurzweil acolyte.
     
  8. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    Jobs are disappearing because there are too many ppl..when i was living in Santa Rosa Ca, jobs were tough to come by,but i did not see lines of ppl looking for work, if i were to guess, i would say that for every job there were maybe 20-30 applicants at that time, I recently went back to visit a friend there (there is a 20 year gap between when i was there and when i visited)
    and i saw 100's of ppl waiting at various locations looking for work (walmart,home depot,unemployment office, etc..) these lines were nonexistent when i lived there.

    technology requires ppl to create,install, maintain, upgrade, and sell it..
    so the jobs that are lost with the creation of a technology is gained by the requirement of the technology for servicing and creation.

    bottom line..ppl need to take more responsibility for there sex lives...if it is so hard to gets jobs now, imagine what it is gonna be like for your kids..
     
  9. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    Prepare for mass social overhaul
     
  10. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Already happening, where have you been?
     
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No. The same thing will happen that happened after the Industrial Revolution: People will have jobs but they won't take so much time out of their lives. Furthermore, people will have jobs doing things that aren't considered "work" today, and in fact many of them will have jobs doing things that we can't even imagine today.

    Since the Agricultural Revolution (the early years of the Neolithic Era) for more than eleven thousand years right up into the Industrial Revolution (the early years of the Industrial Era), more than 99.9% of the people on this planet worked as food producers (farmers and herders) or food distributors (refining, butchering, carrying, packaging, selling it, etc.). This was a brutal occupation that required working 100 hours per week, even after the domestication of draft animals and the invention of iron plows.

    Industrialization mechanized much of the labor that went into food production and distribution. Did this mean that hundreds of millions of people became unemployed? No! For starters, it meant that they no longer had to work hundred-hour weeks. Today in the industrialized world farmers work roughly 40 hours per week like everyone else. But more importantly, only 3-6% (depending on how you identify certain jobs) of the population now works in food production and distribution.

    What do the rest of those people do for a living? The answer is that they do jobs that no one in the pre-industrial era could have even imagined. They build all that equipment that makes farmers' lives easier. They build houses six or eight times larger than anyone except the lords and ladies lived in in the old days. They teach every child in the developed world reading, history, math, science, sports, music, and many other things that only the children of aristocrats could learn before the printing press was invented. They build roads for vehicles that travel farther in an hour than our ancestors could travel in a week--and they build those vehicles. They build communication devices that even we don't understand very well, and millions of them produce news, entertainment and educational programming for those devices, as well as the software that runs them. They build furniture that only kings had. They make meals that we can stop and pick up on our way home from work. They fix our plumbing and our appliances. ("What do those words mean, 18th-century Daddy?") They run travel agencies, fitness centers, pet shops, and myriad other businesses whose purposes the people of 300 years ago could not comprehend. They use science and engineering to prevent illness and to treat us when we get sick.

    Again, I stress that if you had told someone in 1750 that one day it would only take an hour of human labor to feed a human being for a week, he would gasp and say, "Omigod, that means there won't be any work for 99% of the population so they'll all starve to death!"

    This is what you guys are telling yourself and telling each other: that because the jobs our grandparents, our parents, and we ourselves are accustomed to doing have become highly automated, no other jobs will come into existence for us to do.

    Now look back about 300 years and tell me you don't feel a little bit foolish about saying that.

    I've spent my entire working life doing a job that no one foresaw when I was born, a mere couple of decades before I launched my career: programming computers. (Well okay now I write the manuals for the users of the software but certainly nobody foresaw that either.) Thomas Watson, president of IBM, said that the human race's total demand for computers would amount to less than one hundred of the devices.

    He died in 1956. How blessedly lucky. He never had to face a stream of reporters asking him how silly he felt for saying that.

    So, which of you wants to be the next Tom Watson?

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    You'll be doing a job that takes ten hours a week, your family will have a nice house on a large plot of land (since you'll be telecommuting and won't have to live in a city unless, like me, you like cities--and also because we now know that the world population will peak in 80-90 years and start falling, so the quadrillions of people crammed together like sardines that the doomsayers predicted isn't really going to happen). I don't know what you'll spend those ten hours a week doing, and you don't either. But it may be as enjoyable, challenging and rewarding as writing computer programs has been for me. Now excuse me, I have to go to one of those fitness centers because my job is too easy.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2012
  12. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    How true!!

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    And beside Tom Watson, anyone remember that other super-smart, super-rich computer guy who said we'd NEVER need more than 64K of memory in our computers? Oh... yeah, - his name was Bill Gates.

    And what about some former head of the U.S. Patent Office (the name escapes me right at the moment) who said that everything that could be invented had now BEEN invented?

    The statements made by those three men who were in positions to better know the future than the rest of us simply point out how short-sighted humans can be when trying to visualize the future. And not a one of you doomsayers in this thread have the slightest inkling of what is to come - none of us do.

    Fraggle is absolutely correct in saying that not a one of us here today can possibly imagine what the jobs of tomorrow will look like. In fact many here don't even seem to be aware of what the TRUE job market looks like even today! There are plenty of good jobs going unfilled right now. The problem is that not enough people looking for jobs have the right skills to fill those jobs. And that's not to even mention the decent jobs available that too many people consider are "beneath them." One example is truck driving - and there are many others like that as well.

    Also, most fail to note that the largest growing sector of employment today are service jobs. Leading the pack is the big shortage of workers in the health sector. As people continue to live longer, the problems that arise with advanced age are causing the number of people with health problems to skyrocket. The result is that there simply aren't enough doctors, nurses nor technicians to go around. And that last one - technicians - has formed a HUGE pool of jobs just begging to be filled RIGHT NOW!! And not only do those jobs require a much shorter time to train for than a doctor's (what an understatement!) the pay is also excellent.

    The main thrust of what I'm getting at here is not only that some very foolish people try to paint a dim view of future employment, they are also blind to what surrounds them at this very moment. :shrug:
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    No he's not. The jobs of tomorrow will look like this:

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  14. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    BULL!!!! :bugeye:

    Go ahead and believe what you want because that's your right. But it's a long way from that to MAKING your foolishness RIGHT.

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    At least you can take some comfort in the fact that less-than-intelligent thinking is widespread and that makes you a member of a large group. :shrug:
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You are welcome to your opinion, but I think you're delusional. Capitalist economies depend on growth, which is the opposite of sustainability, not that we could sustain it anyway due to it's ever increasing need for energy. Technology isn't energy. The only industry we will really need when times are hard is making food, and I think that's what we will be doing more of. Granted, there might still be auxiliary industries like making barges or wagons to transport food, breweries, cheesemaking, winemaking, probably some construction. But mostly food.
     
  16. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    No, it simply means technology can take over the mundane tasks, allowing people to move on to more advanced jobs.

    It's like suggesting "electronic calculators are making mathematicians disappear". No, they're simply allowing mathematicians to concentrate on more complex math.

    I'm not suggesting jobs aren't disappearing, that's an economy thing, but I am saying technology itself will not result in the elimination of jobs.

    It actually result in the acceleration of human research and development and thus jobs. Computers sure do.
     
  17. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks, but no thanks. I believe it's quite obvious which of us is delusional.

    The reality is that you are no different from those of your ilk that have been predicting gloom-and-doom since the beginning of time. "Oh my, " they would cry, "{insert whatever is going on at the time} is going to be the ruin of all of us!!!!!!! I can easily imagine at one point the "end" was fire because they saw it kill people and destroy animals that were their food supply. At some other point it was "invaders." At another, it was trains that traveled at breakneck speeds in excess of 15 MPH. At yet another it was automobiles because they spelled the end of carriage-makers, horse breeders/sellers and a whole host of support industries. And on and on.

    Yet, as Fraggle so eloquently pointed out, somehow we managed to survive! Just imagine the despair of those naysayers. But not for long because they quickly seized on the next new thing to come along.

    So feel free to continue to cry in your beer. Even though your tears will dilute it somewhat it will never be bad enough to cause the brewery workers to loose their jobs.

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  18. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    OMG lol.
     
  19. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    oops..misspelled their..

    (is that a good OMG or a bad OMG?)
     
  20. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Hey. Uh. Does everything have to degenerate to poo-slinging???

    Spidergoat is entitled to voice his opinion without having his intelligence questioned.

    Seriously.
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Don't forget physical therapists. One doctor told me that that profession is the one in the most need of new recruits.
    You make the common mistake of overlooking the paradigm shift from an industrial economy to an information- and automation-based economy. This is the sixth paradigm shift in the history of our species: a fundamental change in the way we deal with the universe, each other, and ourselves. (Agriculture, cities, bronze, iron, industry, electronics.) In each case the rules were rewritten and the methods of the previous paradigm were replaced.

    As I noted earlier, just look at the changeover from the Iron Age economy of the 18th century to the industrial economy of the 20th. Agriculture, the occupation of 95% of human beings, working 100-hour weeks, is now taken care of by a tiny segment of the population and a whole lot of industrial technology.

    Capitalism itself is an economic system that is mated to the Industrial Revolution. The gigantic projects of industrialization--transcontinental railroads, steamship lines, steel mills, dams, etc. --required concentrations of surplus wealth (or "capital") so large that no one person or even a small group of people could raise it. No banker was willing to loan anyone that much money because they didn't have the assets to put up as collateral. To form a partnership of enough people to raise the money would have been so unwieldy that they'd never make a decision. So the government invented the legal entity of the corporation. People buy their stock and participate in the profits and losses, but not the management.

    Such a deal! But it's a deal suitable only for the Industrial Era. The projects of the Information Age don't require massive capital. China gave every citizen a telephone without having to cut down a single tree to turn into a telephone poll. As I've noted before, my friend's son and his wife emigrated to Estonia and founded a wildly successful software house with only their life savings as startup capital.

    Capitalism was the economic system of the 19th and 20th century. Something else will take its place. If we were smart, instead of grumbling about the idiotic antics of capitalists in their death throes, we'd be figuring out what new sort of post-industrial economic model the government is going to foist on us, and be ready to deal with its peculiar inequities and inefficiencies.
    No, but technology generates energy. One of the earliest technologies was the taming of fire. One of the newest is nuclear fusion.

    As I've said before, the ultimate solution to our energy problem is gigantic solar collectors in high orbit beaming down more energy than we can possibly use in microwave form. While the world's atavistic Industrial-Era governments get their act together and learn how to cooperate to build those collectors, the Green opposition will be stampeded into the ground as people demand more nuclear plants to run their economy in the interim.
    Why do you suppose that our smoothly-running industrialized and automated food production and distribution system will fail? Terrorism? Incompetent maintenance? Surely not lack of energy, since as I said, people will demand more nuclear powerplants as the fossil fuel generators begin to brown out more frequently. Desperate countries like Angola, Paraguay, Kyrgyzstan, and North Korea will be happy to build nukes quickly, shortcutting all the pesky safety regulations, and sell the output to everyone else. And everyone else will be happy to buy it.

    This is not exactly a utopia but it's also not a breakdown of civilization. It's sort of an updated replay of the Dickensian nightmare of the early decades of the Industrial Era. We got past that, and we'll get past this.

    The history of civilization is eleven thousand years of inexorable progress. Certainly not monotonic, but overall it's been steady improvement. There's no good reason to suppose it will stop now.
     
  22. Gravage Registered Senior Member

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    I don't care what you said, I simply don't believe high-tech will bring us more free time only more people will get fired just to preserve more money.
    Sorry I don't believe in high-tech anymore.
     
  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You have totally misunderstood me. I don't think the future will necessarily involve doom or gloom. I'm optimistic that our future lives will be the opposite of what they are now: boring, repetitive, hopeless, uninspiring, bleak, without rewarding activity or connection to our fellow man. We will live closer to other people and have to get along with them out of necessity. We will have to make things with our hands and our skills. We will have to recall forgotten trades. All in all, it will be a better, less artificial life. I look forward to it!

    On the other hand, it appears that you, never having experienced anything other than a life defined by 50+ years of cheap easily obtained energy, have the absurd belief that this temporary state of affairs can go on indefinitely! You have an almost religious faith in science to be able to create the technology we need to sustain the unsustainable for ever and ever.

    My belief is that trains are good, cars are bad. It's not the speeds, which are similar, but the efficiency. (And the consumerism that is largely the purview of the personal automobile)
     
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