Inside or outside won’t really matter much. It depends on the size of the company. But some sort of corporate travel agency will always exist to enforce travel rules. But it will be highly automated - I think we get charged extra to talk to a person about making reservations.
Still, I doubt machines will be drafting pleadings or negotiating with opposing counsel or arguing in court in your lifetime or mine.
I think your estimate is wildly optimistic, even though I agree with the eventual premise. 30 years? Of course we’re going to see whole classes of professions disappear in the next 30 years, and plenty of those will be what we consider “knowledge jobs”. But much more likely is that technology will increase the productivity of existing workers by taking parts of their workload. An expert system that can diagnose a patient’s symptoms is one thing, changing a bedpan is quite another.
Will anything alleviate the massive Human suffering this will cause?
Moderators of Message Boards.
I expect they will fade out as did travel agents. Are there still any left?
How about block layers? I believe one could make a block laying robot right now, but you’d probably need a robot tech standing behind it to make sure it works correctly.
Why would who be suffering?
Machines may replace judges. Input facts and mitigations > output sentence.
I once read an SF short Story regarding a Robot Pope.
The millions of unemployed, who will be utterly unable to feed, clothe, or house themselves.
After all, the practical definition of a robot is: a machine designed to eliminate a job.
And, unlike prior kinds of automation, digital tech does not seem to create new job opportunities.
(If you disagree with this last part, please give me a rational reason as to why.)
Well, robots, probably.
So what are all those people working in Silicon Valley doing?
The problem with the doom-and-gloomers is that they never predict the jobs that are created by automation. 20 years ago who would have thought we’d have jobs at Facebook, Hulu, and Snapchat? Take the example of online travel agencies (e.g. Expedia): sure, plenty of travel agents have lost their jobs. Some of those are made up for by the jobs at the OTAs. Much more importantly, OTAs have made travel easier and less expensive. The result is that more people travel which leads to more jobs in the travel industry. So yeah, travel agents lost their jobs but the money that went into their salaries just moved to other people and we get to travel more. This is a win.
It’s not optimism, it’s pessimism. If it turns over that quickly, social conditions in the United States and many other countries will cause the massive human suffering mentioned in Bosda’s post. A longer ramp up will allow societies to adapt. Doubt that will happen.
It is possible that I am wrong on the timeline. I certainly hope I am. But I don’t see how I can possibly be wrong in terms of my basic idea. Like I said, the improvements in software and hardware that are needed to make human bodies and most human minds replaceable are incremental. You don’t need A.I. to cook a burger, assemble a motherboard or run a harvester. The days of humans being needed to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered are rapidly drawing to a close.
Facebook is a good example of what I’m talking about. It is a company that employed a little over 8000 people in September 2014. It had revenues of $3.2 billion in the third quarter of 2014. So we’re talking $10 billion in annual revenues (as I think $3.2 was a high for them I lopped off about two billion to be conservative). That’s a little more than a million dollars in revenue, per employee (based on 8,500 employees, a little more than they actually had, but once again, being conservative). Imagine what they’d make if they had 80,000 employees!
General Motors currently has about that number of workers: about 75,000. In 1970 they had 400,000 workers.
You know what replaced a lot of those workers?
Robots and automation. GM was one of the early adapters. But … every One Percenter is gonna be an adapter, sooner or later. And the rest of us … we’ll be unemployed. And unemployable.
I think the only way out is Basic Income. I expect conservatives to have enough political and economic power to make it unlikely to be adopted until that massive human suffering you speak of occurs. I’m hoping to avoid mass die-offs, but I can see a lot of One Percenters not being interested in avoiding them at all. But the timelines could be off, or the corporations could see the writing on the wall and advocate for a Basic Income so people will have money to buy their products and services. I’m not expecting a lot in the way of foresight here, though … companies seem very oriented toward the short term nowadays.
Don’t forget somebody has to fix the robots.
A huge number of those workers are gone because of spinoffs and sales of divisions to other companies:
United States GM Defense 1950–2003 was once part of General Motors Diesel Division and as General Dynamics Land Systems division of General Dynamics
United States Electro Motive Division of General Motors was also once part of General Motors Diesel Division and now known as Electro-Motive Diesel
United States Detroit Diesel sold to Penske Corporation; broken up and portion sold to the former DaimlerChrysler AG (now Daimler AG); now part of Daimler AG
Canada Diesel Division of General Motors of Canada Limited spun off and later acquired by General Motors Canada as Diesel Division of General Motors of Canada Limited
United States EDS – Electronic Data Systems
United States Delco Remy (1918–1994) - spun off
United States Magnaquench (–1994) - spun off
United States Hughes Electronics sold to News Corporation in 2003
United States 1999 GM spun off its parts making operations as Delphi
Also note that in 1970 GM was the dominant automobile manufacturer in the world–it no longer is.
On rechecking the Wikipedia articles says: “General Motors employs 212,000 people and does business in more than 120 countries.”, not 75,000.
So why didn’t we see a rise in unemployment starting the in the 70’s? If you were right we’d see a steady rise in unemployment as people are put out of work. That hasn’t happened. I’ve given my reason: automation frees up people to do other work.
A while ago I came across a Life Magazine from 1963. One of the main articles was titled Impact of Automation: Its Accelerating Effects have Pushed Our Society to the Point of No Return.. It was sounding the exact same alarm as you: automation was coming into manufacturing and labor leaders were sure that debilitating unemployment was coming, as high as 20%. And it never happened. There was never even a noticeable blip on employment (other than the usual fluctuations). I’m not concerned.
The one thing I might concede is that automation possibly makes it harder for people with below-average intelligence to find a high-paying job. I haven’t seen any evidence that it does, however.
Not gonna happen.
“More” is a One Percenter’s favorite word.
And even unlimited wealth & energy is “too little to share”.