[JV153]

KJ been watching the Twilight Zone, Obsolete.

[JV153]

Incidentally, I walked through a library gate (3M), the one with RFID detectors with a 2 euro suitcase that I bought at a flea market. The gate didn't go off, so I'm not sure if the gate is obsolete (uh.. isn't working)
this was by sheer accident. After my accident, my senses and memory were markedly improved. Felt like spiderman, who received a dose of super-radiation.
http://www.alphaworld.com/en/our-solutions/spider-wraps

[Plantagenet]

Barristas are now obsolete.

cafe-xs-robot-barista-may-put-hipsters-out-of-a-job

The new hip and groovy thing in San Francisco is getting your expresso from a robot barrista.


Would you like zzzzzt cream and sugar with that? bzzzzzt!

[Zarquon]

Tanada, are you under the impression that somebody is in charge of the Economy? That used to be true in the USSR or Cuba, to name a couple of places. It never has been true anywhere where Capitalism exists, because Chaos Theory holds sway in those places.

As comforting as it is to believe so, there is nobody in charge of a Capitalist economy, never has been, and never will be. There is no master plan, almost everything that a government does amounts to positive feedback, causing our Economic system to oscillate from one extreme to the other, accelerating and increasing the peaks, and deepening the doldrums.

Two things I read come to mind:

An anecdote from a book about KGB operations in the west, by some renowned Oxford historian, saying that for a few decades the KGB residents in the west had standing orders to look for any clues which could lead them to the hidden command center, where the economy of the US and its satellites was planned. They needed to infiltrate it to see why it worked so much better than their own. But they never found it; apparently you guys hid it too well.

Secondly, an old review of a scholarly book (which I never found anywhere) by a US economist (and later cabinet member under Reagan) from the seventies, arguing that the Soviet planned economy ... wasn't. In theory, the party would dictate that the focus of the next five-year plan would be agriculture. Then the thousands of experts at GOSPLAN would order the tractor factory in Omsk to produce 1,000 tractors a month, the tractor tire factory in Kazakhstan to deliver 4,000 tires to Omsk, and the ministry of trade to buy so and so much rubber for the tires.

In practice, knowing that the system didn't work anyway and that tire deliveries were rare and somewhat random, the factory from Omsk manager would have a quiet chat with the planning officials and tell them how many tractors they probably could produce, with a little luck. Then that estimate *became the plan*. And thus the plan could always, or mostly, be fulfilled.

But going back to the first anecdote: it seems that nobody told the almighty KGB. They were supposed to know everything about everyone working in the planned economy. They didn't know that the economy wasn't planned.

[Zarquon]

IMHO automation is doing a lot of harm and needs to be seriously considered. This is a very old concern. I've noted before Russels 1933 essay but also recently read Huxleys 1931 Brave New World (I had never gotten around to that before for some reason.). Huxley addresses automation and its dangers to social fabric quite directly (while side stepping the population issue.)

This automation issue is one amongst many we have not dealt with forthrightly as a culture. While I understand the various arguments noted above I remain convienced the greater danger is how it erodes the social fabric.

If you accept the premise that 75% of currently existing jobs are going to disappear and demand for products and services with them, isn't the automation industry its own biggest enemy, at least in the medium/long term?

BTW, I'm not convinced of the rapid tech advance in every field making us all obsolete. Many years ago I read an article about a multi-million Euro software project for a German social security administration. One of the largest German IT firms got the contract, then spent several years trying merely to get the customer to finalize the actual requirements and specifications for the system. Its business logic, the actual administrative decision processes the program was supposed to automate or accelerate. They finally threw in the towel. Another large company took over, spent another couple of years trying and then gave up. They realized that despite - or because - thousands of rules and regulations, administrative procedures for each and every case and exception, nobody could agree on how things were actually supposed to work. The paperwork always got done somehow, not always *very* quickly, but it got done. Nobody could explain how.

(And my own limited experiences in custom software design pretty much confirms it. Writing the code wasn't hard. Getting the customer to tell me what it should do exactly was sometimes harder. Fortunately I was mostly a one-man team and the customers were mostly small engineering firms. One engineer, one programmer. No committees and layers of management to deal with.)

Another more recent example from a mainstream media article was about how expert AI systems are already making lawyers obsolete. It smelled strongly of today's typical techno-hype, and it was typically short on details. Armies of robo-lawyers marching through our courts tomorrow. I needed to google a bit before I realized what it was mostly about. In the late 90's I worked for a while (part-time while in uni - I did their web pages, brochures and business cards, but I was curious) for a small start-up in Germany that developed document recognition software. Large companies that receive tens or hundreds of thousands of printed documents per day, like banks or insurances (Coca Cola, too), send this daily mountain of paper into a bank of optical scanners. The software then loads each image, takes a fraction of a second to recognize the form, read handwriting, extract as much information about the content as can be automated and sends it to a screen in the correct department. Bingo, another thirty people made obsolete.

The AI aspect is that they use neuronal networks, modeled on nervous systems, for pattern recognition and these systems can be self-learning, if that's the term. They always had banks of older PCs in their offices, running 24/7, with a hand-written sign on the screen "Do not disturb - I'm learning". After being trained on a few hundred thousand different document images the customer had to supply, their software correctly identified and classified over 99% of them.

And I realized that what they did in the nineties is now arriving in legal firms. For example, when large companies sue each other and demand in court to get information about a specific subject from their competitor, a common tactic for the defendant seems to be to wait till the last day of the deadline - and then deliver literally tons and tons of corporate documents. Knowing that finding any specific information in that much paper will take the other team weeks or months.

Therefore the job gets outsourced to firms which do nothing but legal document review. Take each sheet of paper, give it a number and classify it: is it a contract, bill, correspondence, technical, etc? If it's correspondence, with whom? If it's a bill, for what? One box of paper after another. That's all. Apparently it's what thousands of freshly graduated lawyers do for $20/h (or less) if they can't land a real job in a law firm. A dead end for most. And yes, they're the ones being made obsolete by specialized software. But the tech existed twenty years ago. Robo-lawyers? Don't hold your breath.

[JV153]

If you accept the premise that 75% of currently existing jobs are going to disappear and demand for products and services with them, isn't the automation industry its own biggest enemy, at least in the medium/long term?

Midas Plague (Pohl, Frederik, 1954).