A friend of mine in college was in the elevator operators’ union in NY, and had a summer job running an elevator.
Yes, I’m old.
I really doubt that ten million jobswill be added to the economy in the next few decades, esp. with 3.75 milliion of them (at minimum) being good middle class jobs that a person with no college can succeed in.
Yes, jobs have become antiquated fast in the past. And it will be more widespread, and faster, in the future.
Good thing I did not claim anything about creating 10 million jobs, read again, I do think this will be a bit of column Anthro and a bit of column Bot. 
AFAIK the trend is for many of those good middle class jobs is seen by many companies hiring millennial for technology jobs, jobs like working with big data and security may have a lot of robotic help but the sheer size of it and the fact that humans will have to organize and make sense of it to others is one big example of what I’m talking about.
While driving is looking to become the next buggy whip failed industry the point I made is that at the same time technology is opening other doors, I do think that one should remember (as an example) that if film had not been invented a lot of people involved in the entertainment industry would never had seen any upward mobility.
Correcting that middle paragraph:
AFAIK the trend is for many of those good middle class jobs showing up in many companies that are hiring many millennials for technology jobs. Jobs like working with big data and security may have a lot of robotic help but the sheer size of it and the fact that humans will have to organize it and make sense of it to others is one big example of what I’m talking about.
Got the latest issue of The Atlantic in my mailbox today (the last print magazine I still subscribe to) and they are on the case, with a cover story titled “The End of Work”. The teaser accompanying that title on the cover wonders “Could that be a good thing?” but the actual article (which I’ve merely skimmed so far) seems to answer the question in the negative.
Robot Bricklayer invented in Perth. Can lay out a brick house in two days, compared to four to six weeks for human bricklayers.
Bye bye, bricklayers.
I’m also thinking, could take housing construction costs waaaay down.
Interesting! The funny thing about bricklaying is that I can simultaneously see it as a very skilled (human) trade, that requires an intelligent and conscientious worker to do right, and yet also see it as one that is particularly suited to being automated.
What if the robots are less than peaceful in their takeover?
:dubious:
Best bet? Someone did screwup, but it is more likely that one of the humans did.
Can’t search for the link right now, but apparently some of Amazon’s larger warehouses already have a job somewhat like this.
Robots are employed to stack and retrieve items. And for every N robots, there’s a human supervisor / assistant, whose job is to assist in the event that a robot encounters a situation it can’t resolve.
I’m pretty sure it’s Skynet.
One of the issues I see is that I think that the rich don’t feel properly “rich” unless people are starving and living in the streets. The rich own the Golden Rule 2.0: He who has the GOLD makes the RULES. I think the rich will do everything in their power to maintain their stranglehold on everyone else.
Someone upthread mentioned “post-scarcity” economy, but I don’t think that will ever happen. Why would holders of power change their methods? Manufactured scarcity has worked quite well for them (think deBeers), so why would they ever allow that to change?
OPEC was formed to ensure that individual oil-producing countries did what was best for ALL of the members. Saddam Hussein was known to be a loose cannon in this regard, increasing and decreasing Iraq’s production on a whim, to see America’s gas prices dance to his music. This was one of the reasons Saddam Hussein had to go.
I’m reminded of the 1989 movie, Rude Awakening; when the old hippies return to the US, they learn of tanning parlors. Cheech’s character asks, “How do they keep the sun from shining on people who don’t pay?” The rich haven’t figured that one out yet, but they are actively attempting to block polution-preventing legislation, so it is not a huge leap to believe that we may someday (soon?) be forced to pay for clean air!
What we’ve actually seen in most of the developed world is more people enjoying a standard of living that would have been considered rich in the past, while fewer people live under the poverty line. All we need is for the pattern to continue.
And the only reason I have to say “the developed world” is not because standards are not improving in the developing world – they are, quicker than ever before in human history – but because of the stagnant and failed states that have barely begun to develop and buck the trend. But I don’t think people in rich countries “need” those failed states to exist…most of the time we’re barely aware of them.
That’s not the model that generally works. Companies generally get big by making things that millions can afford.
A good example are smart phones. These are incredibly sophisticated bits of kit, and maybe we could have imagined a future where they cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars, and the rich use them to get ahead while everyone else is left behind.
Instead mass production as well as targeting different price points and markets means that billions can afford them, and they’re ubiquitous now even in relatively poor countries.
I just wanted to weight in, just as a factor, we humans are very good at not being bored. Almost as good as finding ways to make ourselves more bored.
Some people have mentioned arts as a domain likely to be taken over by robots, and they may very well be right, but all I’ve seen have been to the contrary. Automation is basically as fair a game as any. I’ve seen an optimistic trend of moving away from the concept of the “artist” and instead focus on art itself. Duchamp taught us that absolutely everyone can create art, on their own terms and all technological developments since have only emphasized his point.
Arts in a broader sense is, for now, made by humans, but also for humans. To replace that I believe you would need to be on the technological level of artificial humans, however they might manifest themselves, and that does not necessarily replace humans in and of itself.
I agree however I don’t think there will be a clear separation.
Artists make use of technology the same as everyone else. As software becomes more intelligent and able to generate richer content, it will become difficult to say art is mostly man-made and merely assisted by computers.
That is already happening, and I see no reason to fear arts being ‘taken over’ by anything at all. Art and technology goes hand in hand, always has, always will. Sometimes technologies gets fazed out, rediscovered and further developed again by artists, other artists focus on the cutting egde. Take for example Amsterdam RealTime, a GPS tracking system made to generate artworks by selected people moving around in Amsterdam; who is the artist? The person walking? The person who came up with the concept? The GPS-system itself? Does anyone really care? This is just one exmaple from 2002, by the way - there are many others. Here’s a link if anyone’s interested: Waag | Amsterdam RealTime
These questions aren’t so much difficult as they are irrelevant, and they have been irrelevant ever since Duchamp obliterated what it means to be an ‘artist’ and what constitutes an ‘artwork’. Certain people are still having this dreary discussion, but their opinions are becoming less and less relevant every day. Absolutely everyone can make art, and for every new technology connecting people together, empowering whoever to do whatever, the more apparent that becomes.
Art isn’t an object any more. Art is intention, and that’s why I’m arguing you’d need an artificial human or fully autonomous artificial mind, not just an AI, to create art. If you program an AI to create art for you, then that AI is part of the artwork itself. And yes, people have been doing that too!
To boil it down, there isn’t any separation, and there doesn’t need to be. To be honest, if we for some reason would create artificial minds for the purpose of art I wouldn’t be afraid of my ‘job’, I’d be really interested to see what the hell they could come up with!
Sorry for the derail! It’s just something that bugs me a bit!