Posted on 03/16/2015 4:39:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
For some time, I've been collecting news stories about robots and jobs. By robots, I mean almost any automated process that substitutes machines for people. Here are some examples:
● The restaurant chain Chili's installed 45,000 computer tablets in its U.S. locations, says The Post. The tablets enable customers to pay their bills, play games and place some orders.
● One hotel is introducing a robot bellhop that delivers items to guests' rooms, reports the New York Times. The same story mentions automated golf caddies. Another Times story reports that the German firm Daimler has demonstrated a self-driving truck.
● Lowe's, the hardware chain, is testing a robot that greets customers and directs them to the correct aisle for purchases, says the Wall Street Journal. Once large and expensive, robots have so shrunk in size and price that small factories can use them, says another Journal story.
A specter haunts America: robots. There's a vague fear that continual advances in computing power and software will automate many more jobs. The threat transcends the business cycle. Almost everyone might ultimately be at risk. Could a robot write this column? It seems plausible. Some might even regard that as an improvement.
Ironically, the loudest warning comes from two champions of digital technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and authors of "The Second Machine Age." Digitalization, they argue, creates services (Google, Facebook) and expands consumer choice. But there's also a dark side. "Progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people," they write.
It's easy to see why. Competing with a robot can be futile. Consider a robot costing $25,000. Unlike the $25,000 worker, the robot's expense is one-time; it can work 24 hours a day, and there's no health insurance.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
The problem has never been or ever will be the robots. The problem has always been and will be the growth of the welfare state and the concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands.
I, for one, welcome our new maintenance dependent overlords ;)
I’m all for robots as long as they don’t have a logic system like Democrats, and I would also make an extra entry into the law of robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. A democrat is not a human being.
The problem has never been or ever will be the robots. The problem has always been and will be the growth of the welfare state and the concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands.<<
Our system depends...more or less...on how to allocate the distribution of goods and services. Money and capitalism is our current state and trade tends to use that as the exchange.
Robots would be a jump back to a slave culture. But the slaves would no longer be human. The change to a system where that is the norm will involve great pain, and democracy as libertarians describe so well, is two wolves and a sheep deciding on what is for supper.
What does great pain mean? Don’t know, and as every sci fi writer knows, ten or twenty years from now, if sci fi is still relevant, that is a good run. Reality tends to be a little slower.
DK
They will be given human rights. You won’t be able to turn them off, talk mean to them, nor stop their welfare checks.
Question is will the homosexual robot have more rights than a straight one?
The left is made up of the evil, and the evil enablers who think they’re going good.
You can’t tell me that those in power don’t know the harm, waste, fraud, and abuse that goes on in all their “redistribution” programs.
And you can’t tell me they don’t know that they’re intentionally deceiving their supporters into believing they are “doing good” and therefore they are “good people” for supporting those who are purportedly “helping” people.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Tax the labor of the robot!
Have Robot pay into social security.
If robots must rely on logical sequences, any robot programmed by a liberal would explode in minutes.
Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame talked about how we send everyone to college for administrative jobs that aren’t there, but positions for mechanics and repairmen and assemblers (plumbers, electricians, welders) go unfilled.
And in a world with a lot of robots, those skilled maintenance positions are all the more in demand.
In a world where a billion or more have irregular or no electricity, justifying lots of electrical power for AI is a violation of human rights.
And the scary thing is how many techies assume the machines will make logical decisions for us humans, so much better than people, though the decision making models the machines would use are based on criteria human set.
Gene Roddenberry’s “Andromeda” actually had a decent projection of this. When the rebellion was asked why you’d rebel such a perfect system, the man explained that you had a machine whose solution to the epidemic was kill the infected - cost effective, simple, fast. That not everyone died of the plague and no one wanted to die was irrelevant to the AI.
I have been saying since her birth “I’d rather my daughter become a plumber than any kind of corporate drone.”
My kids have been playing with game design sites. I said that is fun, but the future is to the people who can fix the robots and computer hardware civilization runs on.
I think the first prediction of this goes back to the Luddites of the 18th Century. But “Deux ex machina” goes back as far as the ancient Egyptians, who invented some gimmicks that would still impress today, if you didn’t know what was going on.
In modern times, lots of people were convinced that fast food hamburgers, for example, would soon be completely mechanized, with fast food workers just keeping the place clean and insuring the machines worked and were sanitary. And yes, the machines were created to do this, but didn’t work out, costing more in the short term and long run than do minimum wage workers.
And the novelty of fully machine made hamburgers wore off very quickly.
Yes, new jobs will be created when the robots take the old ones.
The problems is that most of those jobs will call for above average intelligence. And by definition 50% of the population is of below average intelligence.
We’re already seeing a big split. High-skill jobs are in great demand with high wages. Low-skill workers are a glut on the market with low wages.
This trend will continue and intensify.
IMO increasingly there will be less and less demand, in an economic sense, for jobs people on the lower end of the intelligence scale are capable of doing or of being trained to do.
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