Not really that much of an age old problem.
It has quite Dramatically taken off this past generation or two.
this guy wants to eliminate all jobs. He will wish he didn’t.
Not to fear. Many countries on the rise will not be able to afford all of these gadgets right away (some don’t even have good roads, no less driverless cars).
as America continues it’s decay into the moral abyss, other rising economies will do just fine.
I remember being told while I was learning Office and Typing 23 years ago by some beat up has been who had given up on life, that learning to type was a “waste of time because there is voice typing technology now”.
Still plenty of presentations centers in NYC that desperately need presentations makers and typists, 23 years after this prophet of doom warned me.
Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3309980/posts
Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3309980/posts
If technology were going to put people out of work, wouldn’t it have done so in the last couple hundred years since the industrial revolution? I mean we’ve seen the introduction of technologies that are far more disruptive than self driving vehicles, yet the persistent pattern is that at least 90 percent of people are able to find work. I think it’s easy to fail to imagine the new ways that dislocated people can be employed. The whole creative destruction thing is real, but its workings are hard to visualize before they’ve materialized.
Its the fact that in the near future insurance companies will start pressuring for self driving vehicles claiming that they are "safer" so that will become a liberal chant. Liberals will claim that these are better on fuel and take less resources to build, this will be added to the dogma and doctrine of the religion of Ecowackoism. Uber/Lift like sites will pop up so people can share a cheap ride and not have the monthly overhead of a vehicle, government will possibly even subsidize it to "save Gaia".
Freedom to move as one sees fit without government tracking will have disappeared and the people will have demanded it. They will applaud as the last private human piloted vehicle not already in the collection of some well connected stooge is crushed.
They wont realize how dependent they have become. When its pointed out they wont care...
...until its too late.
The number of PRODUCTIVE jobs has been declining for decades. The number of PARASITIC jobs has been rising for decades.
The number of government parasites will rise to fill the vacuum created by the falling need for productive workers.
Over time, in theory, the parasites will be feasting off the labors of robots and other automation, all powered by extremely cheap energy, such as nuclear fusion.
So far, the theory is a failure and the world economy is a mess.
Nuclear fusion would go a long way to fixing it all.
However, fixing the economics will not fix the problem of declining liberty. Armies of government parasite workers also feast on what remains of individual liberty.
In theory: utopia.
In practice: dystopia.
ping
As long as the government needs tax revenue there will always be jobs.
This could be the subject of fascinating research. I am not sure that we’d want to turn it loose until it had logged something like many millions of well-assorted research miles.
For vehicles that are particularly hard to drive like semi trucks, this could be a boon. A truck that behaved itself well in all kinds of traffic without losing its patience, so to speak, could be a wonder. Dealing with endpoints should probably still be done by a live driver.
Trucksong by Andrew Macrae
Dystopian post-apocalyptic Aussie cyberpunk written in a future patois. The trucks are cyborgs, the *drivers* (the ones left) are addicts. There’s an entertainment/religion based on an intermittently-operating satellite that can control the trucks. Not for everyone, but it addresses some of the AI issues. How many humans really _want_ to drive through the Nullabor Plain on a regular basis? What happens when intelligent trucks ditch the human component?
I think the same thing will be true with self-driving cars, but the effect on society and the economy will be much greater. OTOH, we had "driverless cars" when we had a passenger train system.
Just a side note - I know a late 30s computer science grad, employed by one of the top technology companies on the planet (household name), who is doing meaningful AI / machine learning research with a homebrew supercomputer costing in the mid 4 figures. 30 TFLOPS.
It really is amazing what you can do these days. Hardware giving you ludicrous capability is cheap.
“He is claiming that his car is not programmed by rules to drive, but rather was taught to drive by watching him drive.”
That reminds me of a line from a science fiction movie years ago. An alien crash lands on earth and takes the form of the dead husband of a grieving widow. He learns by imitation and learned to drive by watching her. She is amazed when he tells her he can now drive, so she asks him what a red stoplight means. He replies “Red means Stop, Green means Go, Amber means go faster”.
Red herring. There will always be plenty of jobs with manual skills needed
What if AI takes over the programming?
That's actually more likely. It means I will have to retrain as a plumber.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Many jobs will remain due to human demand and lack of trust in machines.
The Great Shift Toward Automation and the Future of Employment
http://hubpages.com/business/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment