and i hope the whiny azz, gimmie $15 an hour to spit in your fast food makers are the first to go...I read the article. Not much content there. :(
Bring back US jobs now.
and i hope the whiny azz, gimmie $15 an hour to spit in your fast food makers are the first to go...I often use the automated check-out in stores. They’re great. But the automated check-out machines, while great, need a employee to hover around helping people with machines that malfunction or aid customers who don’t know how to operate them. Every time a new machine or technology is created, humans are needed to build and maintain those machines. So some jobs are lost through machines, but others are created. It’s called creative destruction after economist Joseph Schumpeter.
Well, according to king hussein we’ve already gotten rid of bank tellers and travel agents due to their jobs being “robotized”. Huh? What an idiot. And, don’t forget. GWB was the stupid one.
Much of my job as an engineer was boringly repetitive. I thought of ways to automate it using the existing software. Assembling data, reports etc. became easier and easier. If the company I worked for had made a purposeful effort the work load across the board would have dropped 30% with just a one time cost for programs inside platforms like Excel, which can look in a half dozen different databases and assemble a report and draw charts. It would take only a quick check and edit. But the company would rather bill every possible hour. I was told, “Are you crazy? Our profit is a percentage of costs. Besides, do you want to lose your job?”
Incidentally, they’ve laid off half of their workforce to date and will lay off half of the remainder sometime after Q1 next year. That’s about 7,000 people total.
Does that mean that New York can get rid of all those Muslim cab drivers then and ship them back to sh!tholeistan?
First, a large unskilled population is not an asset but a liability. To those conservatives and liberals who want to flood the country with unskilled immigrants in order to prop up Social Security, consider that these people will not contribute but will subtract from the gross domestic product.
Second, Ponzi schemes such as Social Security which depend on an ever-increasing base of wage earners for the pyramid to continue are in for real trouble if lower-class workers are replaced with machines.
Third, if humans can be replaced by computers in the private and domestic sphere they can be replaced at a wholesale level among the military forces. Increasingly large populations will not be the foundation upon which mighty defense forces are erected. Strong economies will remain indispensable to strong defense but those economies will be digital economies. Conservatives believe that we have to increase the population to stay strong are only courting weakness. In the future large population centers will not be so much an asset but targets.
Fourth, to the degree that we parcel out healthcare in this country based on employment status, that will have to be changed. I am not suggesting a single-payer system but I am suggesting that employers will look at computerizing their jobs because computers don't get sick and they don't get sick leave, pregnancy leave, or require ever-increasing medical insurance payments. Moreover, the government is much less inclined to regulate business to protect machines.
Fifth, income taxes are at least partially Texas on wages but wages might be decreasingly how wealth is accumulated in the future as machines take over more and more of production. The challenge for conservatives will be to find a way to fund the government by taxing the output of machines without introducing socialism, without confiscating property and without creating disincentives to computerize and produce.
Sixth, education will have to be radically reformed in order to create a workforce which can create and program the machines used to produce widgets and provide services. Much like our Social Security system and our healthcare system which are based on wage earning, our educational system used to be based on wage earning and now is based on social engineering. Both models will have to be abandoned and education will have to be demonstrably related to producing talent which is usable. This is primarily a political problem.
Seventh, as the world becomes increasingly technological a higher and higher percentage of the population will reveal themselves to be incapable of contributing. They will prove an increasing drag on the economy and they will be exploited by demagogues who will attempt to prohibit businesses from hiring only people with talent enough to contribute. Race will be invoked. Somehow this must be solved.
Most people are robots anyway so this shouldn’t matter much.
Nothing new. What is that statistic? A hundred years ago 90% of Americans raised food, now, 1%? That’s a lot of automation. One major occupation a hundred years ago was “calculator”. That of course is gone. Typesetters, typists, proofreaders, draftsmen, elevator operators, traffic control cops (in some countries signal lights are called “robots”), etc.
I’m expecting to see fast food jump into automation very soon. The local “Wawa” stores have kiosks for customers to make orders at the deli counter — even things like rolls. There is no human contact. The next step is replacing the sandwich assemblers with “Baxter”. It will happen fast, and there will be “labor” issues — lots of strikes and riots.
Soon the carbon based interface units will be declared redundant — and will have to be deactivated.
The more mandates and taxes they load onto employers the more that automation will become the better choice.
So the 47% Romney talked about could be replaced? Serves them right I guess. :-)
Labor saving machinery may cause unemployment of some temporarily, but the productivity of labor of the economy as a whole will be increased,which benefits all wage earners in the long run after a period of adjustment.The increase in the productivity of labor raises the real wage rates of the average wage earner by increasing the total productive ability of the economy as a whole, which leads to an increased supply, which leads to lower prices and more buying power of consumers.
Fragile. Very fragile. There are a few who have purchased some automation with the help of government and banks, but most of them are in debt that won’t be paid. Most of the people saying that they’re replacing men with machines (while importing more products from the Asian and other Flintstones instead) won’t be able to take care of themselves.