Posted on 03/29/2021 8:58:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, which first appeared in late 2017, 800 million workers across the world could lose their jobs to robots, including one-third of the workforce in the United States. And while the report says that those who operate machines and "food workers" will suffer most, robots or automation, the report claims, will displace its share of mortgage brokers, paralegals, accountants and back-office workers.
CBS's 60 Minutes last night had a segment on the future of robotics, showing the technology's rapid advances.
By 2030, if the experts are correct, anywhere from 39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. may be lost due to the robots. If we consider just one trend of the digital decade, the decentralization of finance, what is called De-Fi, or financial transactions executed on the block chain, intermediaries such as bankers, lawyers, mortgage brokers etc. will not be necessary to affect transactions that can be done transparently and within minutes in the digital universe.
In a July 2020 study by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and Boston University professor Pascual Restrepo, Ph.D., called "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from the U.S. Labor Markets," they calculated the following: "...for every robot added per 1,000 workers in the U.S., wages decline by 0.42% and the employment-to-population ratio goes down by 0.2 percentage points-to date, this means the loss of about 400,000 jobs."
The professors examined 19 industries and determined that "adding one robot reduces employment nationwide by 3.3 workers.” And while workers without a college degree will be harder hit than those with a college degree, (at this point industrial robots are displacing workers at a far greater rate than other industries) the authors explain that at this point in America, there are relatively few robots affecting the U.S. economy today,
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Maybe they should tax the companies a Robot-Tax.
Other than an occasional maintenance shutdown, they can work 24/7. Robots don't need to rest, they don't get bored and forget details of their job, and don't have personal problems that distract them. What's not to like? Stay ahead of the game; train to maintain robots.
I just took a road trip from boston to tennessee and back. The whole way I was thinking about all the trucks and how the entire ecosystem of shipping is going to be changed over the next 20 years or so. There will be little need for drivers except for the local short hauls, service stations will have to change, ...
Think back and how not so long ago there were no internet connected phones with navigation apps, no google street maps, no wi-fi at most hotels and businesses. Change is accellerating.
It would almost seem as if they are getting ready for a world without (or at least with far fewer) people.
We also talked about what would happen when robots did all the work...where would we get our income? Anyway, he said that the government would control the robots, what they made and their level of output and the government would send a check to everyone.
I'm a 77 YO retired chip-maker and my son is a 53 YO physicist.
My son said that the most impactful thing I ever did to advance his education was to give him this, many years ago.
(Ahem) Now, where is my $1,400.00 stimulus check.
Yup. There will be little need for drivers of long-haul electric trucks that will be able to automatically change battery packs every few hundred miles. Battery-pack changing will be the new 'service-stations.'
Electric vehicles use seven time more copper than do gasoline cars...there's money to be made there somehow.
Trouble is that bad teachers have almost guaranteed jobs. So the robots will replace the good teachers.
“Technological Threat” animation (1988) (The wolves are in Tex Avery’s style)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiTgoRR3tbk
Long over due.
Most teachers and even in a college/university, they do not really teach.
They get handed a curricula, textbook, workbook, online framework to use... Everything they do is scripted and they are no more than a highly paid presenter where on rare occasion if asked a question and someone needs help they can actually reach back to their own knowledge... You already have this automated assembly line education system. Most of these educators do not have the time to individually do much for those they are instructing (student to kid ratio, too many classes and not enough grading/conference periods, bogged down with massive admin burdens to CYA everything).
All you’ll do by automating it completely is remove the face of a teacher that in most cases cannot actually help anyway.
Your son is very insightful. Govt wouldn't need to control the robots though, corps. like Amazon etc. could, and they'd be taxed to provide the checks - or as it will be called, universal basic income.
An interesting follow-up question is: what would all the unemployed people do? Perhaps we'd become the land of lotus-eaters. Virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics would be so good that a person could just plug into a matrix and exist in any virtual world of their choosing, permanently. Robotics could handle the bio-functions, UBI would take care of expenses, and instead of fentanyl and heroin, people could just spend their lives in a virtual Shire, Vulcan or that planet with the blue enviro-aliens.
The issue calls to mind the “Lil Abner” comic strip back in the 1950s . . . and the advent of the Schmoo. This creature (of the cartoonist’s imagination) loved people and turned itself into whatever the nearest person wanted. You’re hungry? The Schmoo turns itself into a ham instantly.
The obvious question being, "how does the pig farmer make money?” For that matter, if Schmoos are ubiquitous, how can anyone make money?
Telephone operators were women - but there are far more women working now than in the days of the “Number please” telephone operator.
Is your point that the economy is always evolving, and that new jobs will replace jobs lost to robots?
In the old days, I actually thought that hypertext might replace teaching. I thought that students would be given the assignment of installing hypertext links to explain everything that they learned in class. So the next student taking the class wouldn’t just have the textbook, s/he would have the text”book” annotated with hypertext linking to explanations of whatever wasn’t instantly clear in the original text.And I thought that after a few iterations of students creating the annotation text links, the “text” would become perfect and the teacher would become unnecessary.
And then the Khan Academy came along - and I thought that might make teachers unnecessary. Still hasn’t happened, tho . . .
Wir sind die Roboter!
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I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
I thought that is why we needed so many new immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do
So then tell me again why we also needs robots?
That is true in Houston, TX. HISD will only accept applicants with “education degrees”. They will refuse any retired engineer or scientist, and Houston has plenty of engineers and scientists with the energy industry and NASA. The reason - The teacher is supposed to follow the script, no deviation, no illustrations of real world example based on his or her experience (except maybe leftist politics). No real subject matter experts (as in those with real world experience).
As for college, I was lucky. Many of my professors were retired engineers who were still doing consulting work on the side.
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