Posted on 01/25/2013 4:19:12 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
WASHINGTON — They seem right out of a Hollywood fantasy, and they are: Cars that drive themselves have appeared in movies like “I, Robot” and the television show “Knight Rider.”
Now, three years after Google invented one, automated cars could be on their way to a freeway near you. In the U.S., California and other states are rewriting the rules of the road to make way for driverless cars. Just one problem: What happens to the millions of people who make a living driving cars and trucks — jobs that always have seemed sheltered from the onslaught of technology?
“All those jobs are going to disappear in the next 25 years,” predicts Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. “Driving by people will look quaint; it will look like a horse and buggy.”
If automation can unseat bus drivers, urban deliverymen, long-haul truckers, even cabbies, is any job safe?
Vardi poses an equally scary question: “Are we prepared for an economy in which 50 percent of people aren’t working?”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
maintenance of robots.
Fact: Robots and automated machinery will replace human labor at an ever increasing rate.
Question: What should we do?
Answer: Learn how to design robots and automated machinery.
And there are a lot of other answers, very few of which start with an education in Women's Studies.
Thanks to the steam engine and the McCormick Reaper none of us work now!
Well, a few people are still needed for the buggy industry.
Goodness if the buggy industry wan’t needed there would truly be no reason for anyone to work.
Yes...endless meetings on agendas for the next endless meeting!
>>If we are so dependent on machines that nobody knows how they work, that would be a critical point where Man would be obsolete.
I design and program industrial automation, including neural nets. When robots take over the world, people like me will be their gods! </sarc...or not?!?>
I’d expect to see a Barbermatic before I saw a self driving truck that had to share the road with humans.
Who would ever want a robot capable of worship?
>>Answer: Learn how to design robots and automated machinery.
Stay off my turf!!
(See post #25)
Also, people will give up eating food and consume flavorless soy pellets instead of choking down a nasty plate of slow-roasted barbecue.
>>Who would ever want a robot capable of worship?
As long as they worship me, I do! Especially #6!
No, no, no. You’ll just need something to cleanse your musical palate afterward. I recommend this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPRt6Tt6RyM
this does the trick too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD5tU-5NXd4
and if those Swedes (plus one German) fail you, there’s always the Japanese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGi-axL5QTA
That time is quickly growing to a close ~
Here is a more uncomfortable question, but it will get asked. If society can function without input from the bottom 50%, why do they need to be here?
The left may split as Margret Sanger's real social darwinism aims come back to the forefront.
"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to prosperity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."
"Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the “failure” of philanthropy, but rather at its success. p. 38." - From Margret Sanger's Pivot of Civilization
"Choice" was a gimmick in th 1970s to get the foot in the door. But the left, as we know, is always about force. I can see the left splitting over this issue, because on the one hand, the unemployed will keep voting them into power. Yet the Al Gore wing of the party will increasingly not support a population that does nothing but consume scarce resources and burns carbon. And the immigration wing will be finding it ever harder to fight for immigration when our collective consciousness will soon have digested the thought of a generation or more of high unemployment.
That is NOT sarcasm. The last time I looked, the top 9 job categories for a 4 year college graduates were in engineering. Petroleum engineering was at the top. OTOH, the most popular major for college students: Psychology.
On an optimistic note...humans have all the talent they need to rise to that occasion. On a less than optimistic note, the unmotivated ones will die as they should (Darwin Award winners).
Sink or swim.
Reality is non-revocable...it cannot be banned...it cannot be avoided or circumvented.
People continuously confuse WORK and JOBS. Are we actually heading to a time when we are running out of work to be done? I don't think so. What we are lacking is the mechanism to hook up the JOBS to the WORK. For me that means we need to get a lot busier creating the workers who have the skill set to satisfy their future employers. Those skill sets are becoming more and more technical. At the same time the current student population is rapidly losing interest in the hard work that it takes to develop real technical skills.
That is the real danger to society. Too many unskilled people in the workfors looking for jobs that no longer need to be done and for which there are hundreds of applicants per job opening.
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