Posted on 03/14/2014 11:30:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Big changes are coming to the labor 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 that 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").
This is what he said:
"Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses … it's progressing. ... Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. ... 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model."
He's not the only one predicting this gloomy scenario for workers. In January, the Economist ran a big profile naming over a dozen jobs sure to be taken over by robots in the next 20 years, including telemarketers, accountants and retail workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The touch screen ordering has been around for over a decade. It’s more accurate and can use different languages. It only required a person to make the sandwich, and we are at the point where that can now be done when it becomes economically feasible. And the democrats are hastening that time by raising the human cost in a process, thereby cutting jobs for low skilled workers.
He may be right. The income tax tends to be more stable than a consumption tax in an economic downturn. But income taxes discourage specialization. When it costs you 2x what you make to hire someone else, then you do it yourself.
Hence the growth of Home Depot and Lowes.
Look at what IBM is doing with Watson. People will be surprised that it isn’t just lower skill labor that can get automated, knowledge workers are threatened as well.
Robots for that very thing are being researched today.
"I am not afraid of Howard. There's just no credible threat!"
This is a trend that begun with the industrial revolution.
I can list dozen of jobs that no longer exist because of automation (just from within my life time).
Businesses make financial decisions. They do not care if they employe a machine or a person. As long as they can get good quality work for low cost. If a person can do it, fine, if a machine can do it, that is also fine.
As someone else posted, government rules and regulations are making people more expense and trouble to hire and keep.
For individual businesses it makes sense to cut the number of real people and replace them with machines, but what will happen when the majority of people do not have a job or an income (other than welfare which is just a wealth transfer from those that are still working to those that are not)?
It is almost impossible to predict the future, but one thing can be predicted. No trend remains forever. Something will occur to change the way things are going.
Technology cant possibly compare with this administration over killing jobs.
While we're still abundant and generating revenue, they look on the non-elite as a cash crop to be exploited for more power and money. That's fine by them. What they don't want is those of us in the bottom 98% (or so) sharing their physical space. That is the problem with there being so many of us.
Every Windows machine I’ve had in the last 20 years gets slugged up and won’t work at the 2 year point. Unless the world is operating on reliable RTOS’, none of this will work. Of course, reliable RTOS’ are cheap now, so it might come to pass if MS gets out of the way.
Not to worry — a $10/hour or $15/hour minimum wage will bring all those wait-staff jobs back.
Yeah Bill. When you develop a dissecting aneurism, stay home with your bot. Stay the hell outta my ER.
I said a long time ago that we were “technologing” ourselves out of work. When I started my post-Army retirement civilian job, I was covering two attorneys in a law firm. I was working as hard as I could to stay up with them. By the time I retired out in 2007, 14 years later, I was covering FIVE attorneys. Because of computers and such the attorneys were now doing work that I used to do. The more it gets that way, the fewer legal assistant jobs there will be. Our firm had let several jobs go unhired when people left and those attorneys just paired out to other LA’s to cover. It is only going to get worse. Just wait till McDonalds has technology cooking the burgers, answering the drive thru and the robut handing you your order after you swiped your One World Government Credit Card to pay for the order.
*Snort!* Well played!
I’ve wondered how many more years before we see a pilotless remote-controlled passenger jet. Depending on what happened to Flight 370, it might be sooner rather than later.
Gates if you created the bots then we will need twice and many people to remove the bugs from them!!!
and now, thanks to Obama, their operators will get overtime!
They want us to save the planet for THEIR children.
Abortuaries are good enough for our children.
I did some independent consulting for several dinner theaters back in the late 80's/early 90's and they were using touch screens with wifi back then. The waiters/waitress' used thhem to place orders at tableside, the order would print in the kitchen where it would be filled by kitchen staff who then paged the waiter/waitress back to the kitchen via the touch screen device when the order was ready.
I helped implement several of those systems, IIRC the company name of the vended software and hardware solution was Squirrel Systems. It's been over 20 years so I may not remember the vendor's name correctly.
In my Chili's restaurant reference above, that was the first time I'd seen a device at tableside on each table with customers placing their own orders. (They were wif iPads btw with customized application software.)
I’ve believed for a long time that the worlds elites do expect to reach a point where they can live nicely with automation. It may take another 10+ years.
Putting on my tinfoil hat, I think that at that point they will view the “surplus” 6-7 billion people on earth as expendable. Some nasty engineered bug, held in deep storage, will do the trick.
They're certainly trying... just failing way too often on the landings. Humans are still the better option... for now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.