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Obsolete

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Obsolete

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 18:22:05

Obsolete: No longer appropriate for the purpose it was obtained due either to the availability of better alternatives or change in user requirements.

Automation, artificial intelligence, and adaptable general purpose humanoid robots will replace half the human jobs that exist today by 2046. Those 80 million people and the hundreds of thousands of people that join the job market each month will all be unemployed. The ratio of employed to unemployed in 2046 will approximately reverse the present 78/22 to an estimated 25/75, three out of four people will be unemployed.

Human workers are rapidly going obsolete. The middle class is not dwindling, it is being decimated. Even if you or your kids are among the fortunate 1/4th who have employment, the value of human labor is rapidly approaching zero. Those employed will not be middle class, as each wage earner and family will have to be taxed as to support 3 other families. Nor will they earn much to begin with.

Once upon a time, high technology was thought of as a major new source of jobs. In actual truth, tech provides one job for every 8.3 jobs it automates and eliminates. Microsoft, Apple, and Google - the three largest tech companies on the planet, employ worldwide in total less people than join the job market in the USA alone in a single month.

Obsolete is a new video documentary available streaming on Amazon Prime. It is 55 minutes long and worth your time.

We're told the future doesn't need us. With the rise of technology, humans will have to be very clever - and very careful - not to be left behind, because human labor is rapidly losing its value. Is this the real motivation behind a secretive effort to reduce population and centralize control? Maybe the biggest threat we face isn't just automation, but the risk that humans are becoming obsolete.


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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6186630/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 19:51:36

You miss the point. All of those that remain employed are performing the approximately 25% of the jobs that machines cannot do, for the reasons you state. The remaining 75% of jobs have already been obsoleted by present technology, and are being lost as we speak. Within three decades, the transition will be complete.

Rather than making the wrong assumptions about this material, and engaging in a disconnected thread dialogue with me, I'd suggest you just watch the video. Then after you are up to speed, I would be happy to discuss the topic with you.

We are both obsolete, by the way. It does not take a machine with human or near-human capabilities to automate most jobs. It takes a machine that can perform the work-related tasks only - when supervised by another human familiar with such. That single human and his automata then exist where perhaps four to eight people were formerly employed.

This happened to me. During the last year of my employment, I was interacting with a variety of engineering design systems, HR systems, payroll systems, performance assessment systems, budgeting systems, etc. I lost the part time availability of the last human administrator (by then called a "Concierge Facilitator") that was working for my department and four others.

When asked about my recent career, I was fond of responding "I used to be a group of 19 people." It was gallows humor, and when they offered early retirement, plus a cash bonus and medical insurance to bridge me to Medicare, I accepted.
Last edited by KaiserJeep on Sun 20 Nov 2016, 20:09:27, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 20:12:20

All I can say is that none of your assumptions about the nature of this material are especially accurate, and IMHO you need to see it. But it's your time, and the ideas in this video will not comfort you.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Cog » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 20:59:43

At least in construction, whether we are talking roads, bridges, buildings, parking lots, etc, humans will always have to be involved in the process. There are thousands of judgment calls made daily on construction sites. You never have a perfect read of preexisting condition and you have to compensate for those unknowns during the construction process. What are those buried tree trunks doing in the middle of a proposed building slab foundation? What is this drainage line doing here? Its not on the plans. In my 30 years of working in construction surveying and engineering, nothing goes to plan and I mean never. Humans judgment and ability to revise things on the fly is something machines simply can not do.

For repetitive tasks that involve the same conditions every minute, hour, and day, robots do fine. Weld a joint right here. But in the real world where the conditions are changing or unknown they are about useless.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Subjectivist » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 21:15:32

Right now the government 'invests' enourmous subsidies in the form of tax breaks for every bit of automation companies install. Any time they desire to do so the politicians can reverse this policy by removing subsidies for automation and instead giving tax breaks for hiring more workers instead of fewer. Ultimately this would pay at least a goid portion for itself because more workers means more income tax, more medicare/medicaid funds, more Social Security payments flowing into government coffers.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 20 Nov 2016, 21:38:45

Without disagreeing with the last two posts, there still will exist a situation where one out of four is employed. Note that there are simply not going to be many construction projects in a world where 3/4ths of the population is unemployed.

Employment in this new technological economy will not ever increase again, absent a war. It will only decrease.

I'm not understanding the resistance here. After all, peak (conventional) oil happened years ago, and we are now in Kunstler's "Long Emergency" which is a centuries-long process and not an event. From here on out, we celebrate de-growth rather than growth. With very few exceptions, you are as well off today as you will ever be, and as time passes, you will be increasingly uncomfortable, and your kids will surpass that and be in mild distress in the second half of their lives.

We talked about it for years, but oil did peak and now is in decline. The world is in the economic doldrums and yet still we are reproducing and there will be 8 billion humans on the planet by 2020, and the environment will be dying faster than ever.

Enjoy the crash, as it has been happening for years. I never expected that there would be people who did not notice when it happened.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 08:20:00

This obsolescence can not be blamed on muslims or mexican immigrants. Cannot be blamed on off shoring factory jobs either. Cannot be blamed on failed trade agreements.

Let's look forward to a time when our government stops scapegoating and addresses a major social problem of dislocated workers due to automation.

So how would a government cope with a reverse in the employed / unemployed as KJ pointed out if we are looking at 75% unemployment in the next 30-40 years.

How do we engage the unemployed besides military engagements and incarceration?

Welfare will take on a whole new meaning.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Shaved Monkey » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 08:29:46

Build a wall to keep the robots out
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Ibon » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 08:43:27

Shaved Monkey wrote:Build a wall to keep the robots out


ha ha . Very good!
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 09:21:11

We must change the tax laws so that the robots pay the taxes that used to be paid by the humans they have displaced. 8)
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 09:31:57

Ibon wrote:This obsolescence can not be blamed on muslims or mexican immigrants. Cannot be blamed on off shoring factory jobs either. Cannot be blamed on failed trade agreements.

Let's look forward to a time when our government stops scapegoating and addresses a major social problem of dislocated workers due to automation.

So how would a government cope with a reverse in the employed / unemployed as KJ pointed out if we are looking at 75% unemployment in the next 30-40 years.

How do we engage the unemployed besides military engagements and incarceration?

Welfare will take on a whole new meaning.


The real question to my mind is, why do TPTB keep encouraging more and more automation when it is creating more and more problems? Automation is not taking place in a vacuum, nor is it in a laboratory where the results can be tested and weighed to see how wonderful or bad it is going to be if the 'progress' continues down this road.

A branch of my family tree escaped Ireland for the USA/Canada right before the potato famine so I have read up on it a bit. The British Government did not believe in the 'dole' because they knew the history of the Roman Empire and how the 'dole' aka Bread and Circuses had turned out for that ancient Empire and they were hoping to do better with their Empire. They also had recent experience with how price controls on bread during a shortage of wheat had toppled Louis XVI and placed Napoleon Bonaparte in control of the French Empire.

So what was the British solution? Labor for food. If you went to work for the authorities you got paid enough to feed yourself and family. What pray tell did you do? You started with infrastructure projects like fixing potholes, then you moved on to make work projects like collection stones in fields and using them to build boundary walls on the edges. This model was inspirational to FDR in 1933 when he started all those alphabet soup programs paying people to build roads and bridges and post offices and federal courthouses and the Grand Coulee Dam....

With these examples to go by what can TPTB do? Well they can do things like encourage organic hand labor farming. Food forest Permaculture is another option where government land is divided into parcels and 'workers' are hired to live on the parcel and grow everything they need to feed themselves plus earn a little extra for off site things like electricity selling their excess to the Government for use in dense urban communities. The way it would work is the government sets a quota of X produce from the permaculture parcel and anything over X gives bonus cash to the 'employees' to use as they see fit.

Sociologically the key is to make people feel useful even if they are not. People who feel useless become despondent, suicidal, violent and a whole host of other social disorders result from that. That is true of any population, as demonstrated by the mouse and rat studies shown in the documentary. I learned about that rat study in a sociology class way back when I was in school and was unaware that there had also been a mouse study showing the same thing.

Ancient Rome in the first century did it by sending the Army off to fight minor wars all over the place because the Army gave people a job of last resort if they had no other prospects. Right now our government has automated the military to the nth degree to reduce their own labor requirements. Mechanized divisions of super mobile infantry move from A to B on the field of battle at 60 mph just like the tanks instead of marching at 4 mph as was the case throughout history right up until the early 20th Century. Even through World War II and Korea most of the troops from Russia and Germany moved on foot while America was very proud of adopting the 'mechanized infantry' model with Deuce and a half trucks hauling a squad or even two of men each. As a force multiplier in combat this was a great success, and our military was not expected to remain large after the war and it didn't.

As a jobs program after Korea it was not so much of a success and has now automation has been carried beyond all reason to the point that we have nowhere near enough military to do all the tasks they keep being assigned to do. When World War II was taking place only 10 percent of the Army were actually combat troops, the vast majority were behind the lines moving supplies forward or administrating things. Today the percentage of combat troops is even smaller and this has effectively eliminated the reserves making them all active instead. As a result of this every combat casualty taken by the US Army today is a great deal more damaging than it used to be. If your whole army is 80,000 and only 5,000 of those are combat troops then losing 1000 guys a year in combat is twenty percent of your knowledgeable combat troops. They don't all die by any means, but being cashiered out for battle wounds is effectively removing a soldier even when they are not killed outright. Drones and bombers can blow up enemy positions from now until forever, but to hold territory you need trained people on the ground. The last time the USA did that was Viet Nam and when Nixon came into office in 1969 they switched strategy from holding ground to bombing in an effort to reduce casualty rates and end protests in the USA. It was a double failure, not only did the protests continue but the war was slowly lost over the next seven years as fewer troops were expected to do more supported by local military forces. The strategy that failed in Vietnam of 'local force progression' was repeated in Iraq and Iran in the 2003-2016 period as local forces were trained and equipped by the American taxpayer, then when needed in combat they were less than successful. It seems the DOD is dedicated to continuing the failed strategy of the Vietnam War even today, fifty years later.

The reason we are 'becoming obsolete' is a failure of leadership, not a triumph of technology. We can not afford a military where every member is equipped to be a super soldier unless the number of soldiers is very very small. We can not afford a fleet of Gerald Ford class Aircraft Carriers with all its high tech automation and half as many crew as the 1960's Enterprise class, in fact while the navigable world ocean is larger now than it was in 1960 and seaborne trade is much larger than it was in 1960 the number of ships in the US Navy is now at World War I levels. Sink one Gerald Ford class carrier and you have done as much damage to the USA today as if you had sunk an entire task force of 42 ships in 1960. There is no such thing as an unsinkable ship and I promise you if we get into a shooting war with Russia or China they will be eager to prove it by sinking the most valuable ships they can. A thousand destroyer size ships with cruise missiles is a great deal more survivable than a dozen super size carriers and even better because of the crew requirements and maintenance requirements they would employ a great many more workers. The USSR adopted that strategy for their navy right up until they fell apart. The new Russian Navy has returned to those roots with some submarines and many small 'patrol boats' instead of battle cruisers and UK style small aircraft carriers.

Change the leadership goals from 'making Wall Street banks happy' to 'usefully employ as many Americans as possible' and the obsolescence meme will die a silent death. Heck a perfect excuse exists if they ever build the wall on the Mexican border they can deploy a million regular marching infantry in small posts all along its length to patrol and prevent crossings. The Romans did it with Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain and the Chinese did it with the Great Wall on their border with Mongolia. It isn't PC in this day and age, but it is a heck of a jobs program to reduce unemployment.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 13:01:20

Tanada, I have rarely read a post of yours with such heartfelt emotion. However, I think you made a few errors.

Firstly, TPTB are NOT encouraging automation. Automation is occurring because the technology is now available, robots can work virtually 24X7, the work product is more precise, labor unrest is zip, and the profits are greater with robots rather than humans doing jobs robots can do. There is an unbroken evolutionary line back to the automated looms and the weavers that chucked their "sabots" into the water-powered machinery. The last enabling technology was digital electronics, and it is a huge enabler. I remember my parents working for months to afford a giant screen 21" B&W TV set full of tubes - so many tubes that the orange glow lit up the wall behind it. A few months back, I spent so little on a 55" HDTV that I was even astonished - technology marches on is the message.

Nor can you blame the "elites" for policies that encourage automation. The stockholders of a corporation set the goals, and those Middle Class folks are savage in their pursuit of profits for their 401K's and IRA's, so that they too can quit working, collect SS benefits and government healthcare.

Those same folks are the ones who decide to buy and eat the products of corporate farms and "food technologists" rather healthy and organic produce. I'm guilty of that myself even if I shop at the local Farmer's Market. There is no denying that packaged food is cheaper, quicker to prepare, and leaves you more time and money for other things - which is why the average American now spends less than 6% of their income to eat, aside from restaurants.

The consumer decides everything. The stockholders set the corporate goals. The most anybody in government ever does is decide to invade a Middle Eastern country rather than face angry voters, or a Congress intent on exposing sex in the Oval Office, or covert arms sales. We forever and a day blame our problems on others, when our own desires and appetites and greed are the underlying causes.

Believe me, these are problems that government is powerless to solve, and we caused them ourselves, by doing what comes natural in order to satisfy our own desires. We brought about our own obsolescence.

Which would not be a surprise to anyone who actually watched the video above. Believe me, it is worth 55 minutes of your time.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 14:03:17

vtsnowedin wrote:We must change the tax laws so that the robots pay the taxes that used to be paid by the humans they have displaced. 8)

Actually, IMO, if you change that to the OWNERS of the robots (i.e automation in whatever form, including software) that produces stuff (both things and services) we need, then that is what is needed.

So, IMO, where we are going is that much of the workforce will be obsolete, some sort of Guaranteed Minimum Income to support those people will be in force, and we will have two fundamental "classes" of people.

a). The people skilled enough and willing to do the remaining jobs (those too difficult to automate at an acceptable cost, for whatever reason), and those jobs will tend to be well paid (some for danger, others for expertise).

b). Everybody else, who is on the "government dole" as many dystopian futuristic novels tended to call it.
There are many questions, like "What level of income is that"? (i.e. the poverty line, or how far above that). What will be "enough"? Like today, neither side will ever agree, so you'll have lots of fundamental political tension there, etc.

...

IMO, if we had an intelligent, proactive system, we'd be taking a serious look at getting such a system set up ASAP, so we're in front of that issue when things like automated cars, automated fast food, automated factories of many kinds, etc. etc. wipe out million of jobs in various (potentially rapid) waves, likely within two decades. But we have our system, so we'll likely not do that until voters insist on it. When that happens, IMO, is not soon enough, given the educational level of the average voter throughout the first world, but there we are.

And pstarr, there is legitimate dispute about the timing and exactly where the edges of the automation will hit the jobs. Pretending like technology can't work (like you do with things like automated cars) won't make the technology or the issue (the cost of labor vs automation) go away.

Disclosure: As someone who spent 80% of their life/career buried in computers, and experimenting and reading on things like A/I, game playing programs (like writing chess programs that played more like humans than any programs within a couple decades of the time), artificial life, etc. -- I believe it's legitimate for me to say I at least have a "considered" (vs random) opinion on this subject.

Coincidentally, I'm currently taking a serious look at the size and scope of the 92(+) (as of 2013) anti-poverty programs in the US, trying to seriously think about a meaningful proposal for what a Guaranteed Minimum Income would need to look like to replace most or all of that whole mess, and planning to "push" that at Washington (when I'm ready), to at least get them to start thinking about it in some meaningful way. (It gives me something to do, and worst case, it's my time to waste if I fail. And, again, IMO, it's more productive than whining about government. It's like voting -- if I DO SOMETHING and fail, at least then I feel I have the right to complain about the system we end up with).
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Cog » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 14:12:57

People that are idle get up to no good in a short amount of time.

Now if I'm in the semi-skilled class living a higher class lifestyle because I am working all is well. But if I am one who gets a guaranteed existence check which gives me just the basics of food, entertainment, and housing, then I'm always going to want more than that. Since there will be no jobs for me, my only option to improve my lot in life is to steal it from the class who has it. Why eat Soylent green when I can knock someone in the head and eat steak?
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 14:16:30

I don't believe you in the sense that I disagree with your statement of opinion as fact. In your opinion there is nothing that could be done to derail 'progress' into the super automated future where only 25 percent of the world population even has the possibility of getting a job. In my opinion there are thousands of things that could be done as a matter of government policy, the problem is the fossils in power do not see those steps as improvements.

Kaiser what is your definition of Progress?

That is the fundamental question that it all boils down too. The theory that 'you can't stop Progress' has been beat into our culture for at least the last 50 years but nobody in power is considering what the definition of Progress is any longer. They just assume that more automation is Progress so it must be promoted and encouraged every way they can think of. The same goes with farming, up through the 1960's the government encouraged farms of all sizes with a diversified set of crops. Starting very early in the 1970's government policy switched to 'Progress' farming mono crops hedgerow to boundary line with super specialized tools and equipment based on each type of crop. If you consider it Progress to create massive fields of monocrops that are totally dependent on fossil fuel inputs of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides based on petroleum then sure, that is progress. However that completely ignores the vulnerability of monocrop culture growing patterns. If any crop disease comes along that favors one of those monocrops, like say Soybeans, then those millions of acres of soybeans growing border to border create a perfect incubator for that new blight to spread in an unstoppable fashion. Even worse, because we have now so specialized agriculture those farmers have to grow soybeans because they do not have the equipment to plant or harvest alternatives. At the same time feed lots use a lot of soy and corn to fatten up the livestock in the last month or two before slaughter, take away the soy crop and very suddenly they have no balance product to feed along side the corn to keep the livestock healthy in those feed lots.

So I repeat, what is your definition of progress? To specialize ourselves to the point of removing all flexibility and all capacity to rapidly adapt to existential change?

Everything we know of in the physical world has a sigmoid curve of development. You start out with very small improvements, then you have a big burst of rapid change. Those water powered mechanical looms are an example of that. Then along came steam power and finally electric power. But like all sigmoid curves the law of diminishing returns kicks in. As a society as a whole we are now well past the point where additional automation benefits society. Now it only benefits that tiny percentage of people who own the system being automated, and like so many such the social expense of dumping unemployed workers into the social safety net is their way of avoiding responsibility for socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

Image

IOW stop peeing off your balcony and telling me its raining out. Progress has to mean improvement for the whole society, not just those in the select few who can socialize their expenses without concern.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 14:29:00

Tanada wrote:I don't believe you in the sense that I disagree with your statement of opinion as fact. In your opinion there is nothing that could be done to derail 'progress' into the super automated future where only 25 percent of the world population even has the possibility of getting a job. In my opinion there are thousands of things that could be done as a matter of government policy, the problem is the fossils in power do not see those steps as improvements.

Kaiser what is your definition of Progress?

That is the fundamental question that it all boils down too. The theory that 'you can't stop Progress' has been beat into our culture for at least the last 50 years but nobody in power is considering what the definition of Progress is any longer. They just assume that more automation is Progress so it must be promoted and encouraged every way they can think of.


Excellent point, Tanada. With respect, though, you are assuming that too much automation HAS to be bad, due to the way the system is today. Today, automation is proceeding because it works (over time), and because it has major economic (and labor saving) benefits -- within a certain domain.

Humanity needs to directly confront the issue and decide where the lines should be drawn and WHAT (at least in objective, well defined broad strokes) how much automation is "enough". For example, if my computer can be run off of solar and the materials recycled -- you're going to have a TOUGH time convincing me that the labor saving "automation" effects of, say, spreadsheets are not a good thing.

OTOH, anyone should be able to see that blindly following our path and replacing jobs with robots until there is a revolution / civil war is such madness that one would expect (sarcasm on:) a colony of bacteria to be intelligent enough to see the need to intervene before things get too out of hand.

So as with most things, there needs to be balance. And intelligent decisions. And this takes planning and working together. And given our history with that, well:

1). Time to stock up on popcorn.

2). At least I'll be old or dead when push comes to shove if/when we fail to deal with the fundamental issue much more intelligently than said bacteria could.

3). Kind of makes things rather tough for everyone currently under (say) 30 or 40 though, if we fail to plan for this one.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Obsolete

Unread postby careinke » Mon 21 Nov 2016, 14:45:59

pstarr wrote:
KaiserJeep wrote:You miss the point. All of those that remain employed are performing the approximately 25% of the jobs that machines cannot do, for the reasons you state. The remaining 75% of jobs have already been obsoleted by present technology, and are being lost as we speak. Within three decades, the transition will be complete.

Yes, to a degree. Shovels automated certain tasks.
Image
Doesn't necessarily extrapolate to the future. Robotic dogs? No

But anyway, you need to look beyond your day job. Little girls are assemble iphones and flip flops in Vietnam. So I am probably not going watch some breathless video on the wonders of cybernetics or the such. Spielberg and Lucas already covered that. And I have peak oil scifi stories on my mind now. Haven't you heard? Our industrial society is about to collapse. :?


Pstarr has a habit of avoiding looking at evidence contrary to his beliefs. But he will argue eloquently on the topic, even if he doesn't understand it.
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