This Robot just Ethered Half Y'all Job Positions

[the bossman]

Yea, the saturation point will be higher for some jobs more than others. But I believe all will be effected. At least to the point where there will less bodies needed to fulfill the tasks that society needs.

I mean, people can go into a handful of fields that they think will be hard to replace with tech. But at some point, those pools will become overcrowded with people to the point where it will become a Hunger Game to get an entry level job with decent salary for once "well-paying" positions.

It's hard enough for black people, especially black men, to get and keep desirable jobs now. I can only imagine it will become that much harder since black people do not control the means of production.

I believe the money is actually in building up the "hoods" and "ghettos" because those areas lack almost everything and are basically untapped in many ways. But that's not cosmopolitan enough for many, so they will continue to compete in suburbs and downtowns for whatever is left over after non-blacks and soon enough, robots.

Peace

What is your plan/move career-wise after what you see happening with tech and AI right now?

 

[zayk35]

since forever

Since when can you order pizza online and pay in cash on arrival?

 

[Originalman]

As someone who works in engineering/manufacturing and has been involved with design, development and implementation of automated things.

Folks are confusing automated from semi automated. A car with the capability to go into auto pilot as the driver monitors the car is semi automation. No more different then say a microwave which cooks but the operator has to place the item into the machine and then take it out.

Semi automation still requires human decisions and human input/labor. Same as the checkout machines at walmart. They just replaced the worker man power with the customer man power as a cost cutting initiative and sadly customers don't see how they are being played.

Secondly I see multiple comments saying that robots are the reason that manufacturing has decreased in america. That isn't true......too much automation is used as a boogyman in manufacturing.

When most americans don't know that 80% of the stuff in their homes are made in mexico and china and made by hand.

In my profession I travel around the world dealing with manufacturing facilities and suppliers. Most this stuff is made with a humans performing labor tasks and if it is done by a machine at the most it is labor intense hand machines or labor intense semi automated.

I am talking about TVs, cell phones, nikes, caste dies that make your car engineer parts, circuit boards that go in your electronics all this stuff.

And even if some steps are semi automated it is still inspected by human eyes and god forbid it has yield issues (failures) it is broken down by human hands and repaired by human hands.

That is not to say that automation isnt the future....but I want us to be accurate here.

One last thing as automation or semi automation is a big push because of two things. The economy is good so truck loads of money is thrown into R&D (which comes to a stand still whenever the economy tanks) and labor rates.

You can travel to india and mexico and see very little automation and semi automation. You may ask why? Well for one the labor rates are low and operators make maybe 3 dollars an hour. The populations are large, there is very few skilled folks to work on these machines and their are no unions. So this is an employers dream. Why spend well over 1 mill for each automated or 200k for each semi automated machine. It will take you a while to get a IRO. When your workers are cheap and expendable.

Another thing the overhead on automated and semi automated machines are high and they need highly skilled technicians. Most of the technology is state of the art and done by small companies who have small staffs. It can take weeks and months sometimes to get folks to come and repair or look at the machine once it breaks down.

Once I had a 300k state of the art semi automated laser machine break down on me. The company who made it was in europe. It took a technician 3 weeks to come and fix the machine because he was one of 2 people in the whole world who could fix it. So he was on travel throughout the world a lot. So often times only the biggest and baddest companies have the capital to invest in these machines.

 

[aXiom]

How many decades have they been talking about this breh? The past 2 at least. This shyt is another 2 or 3 decades away and at very low levels

This is a long read, bit it's very informative to people who are skeptical of the speed at which technology is advancing:

Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shyt about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication, etc.—definitely wouldn’t make him die.

No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, he’d have to go much farther back—maybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer world—from a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal species—saw the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being “inside,” and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery—he’d likely die.

And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, he’d show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay what’s your point who cares.” For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, he’d have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.

In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock they’d experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a “die level of progress,” or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 years. The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.

This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced. 19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so it’s no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century—15th century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity.

This works on smaller scales too. The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.

This is for the same reason we just discussed—the Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985—because the former was a more advanced world—so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?

Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000—in other words, by 2000, the rate of progress was five times faster than the average rate of progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th century’s worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century’s worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th century’s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 39.

If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015—i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decades—and the world in 2050 might be so vastly different than today’s world that we would barely recognize it.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable than you or I firmly believe—and if you look at history, it’s what we should logically predict.

So then why, when you hear me say something like “the world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable,” are you thinking, “Cool….but nahhhhhhh”? Three reasons we’re skeptical of outlandish forecasts of the future:

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why

It's a lot harder to see just how fast we're advancing when it's all around you. You have to step back and look at it over a longer time frame.

 

[mcdivit85]

What is your plan/move career-wise after what you see happening with tech and AI right now?

1. Bought a nice home for reasonable price in nice neighborhood within my means

- A lot of middle class people buy homes that stretch them and leave them needing two incomes to maintain. Purposefully bought a home that only needs one income for the PITI and that we plan to pay off much sooner than maturity date.

- To me, this relates to career since most workers are working to maintain a home and lifestyle based around that home. And having a home that forces both people to stretch to maintain tends to hamstring people vocationally. They become stuck in more ways than one.

2. Purchasing income-producing property for cash flow

- After wedding costs are fully paid off, myself and my fiance will begin a program of buying an income-producing rental property once per year to add income outside of work

- These will mostly be in working class neighborhoods with high percentage of renters

3. Creating small business(es) of my own

- Adding more income sources outside of work

- Creating a plan to transition back to a consultant in my field since I believe the days of full-time, full benefit employment have been winding down for some time. I believe contract work will become more like the norm instead of the exception for new hires of all ages and backgrounds.

Peace

 

[the bossman]

As someone who works in engineering/manufacturing and has been involved with design, development and implementation of automated things.

Folks are confusing automated from semi automated. A car with the capability to go into auto pilot as the driver monitors the car is semi automation. No more different then say a microwave which cooks but the operator has to place the item into the machine and then take it out.

Semi automation still requires human decisions and human input/labor. Same as the checkout machines at walmart. They just replaced the worker man power with the customer man power as a cost cutting initiative and sadly customers don't see how they are being played.

Secondly I see multiple comments saying that robots are the reason that manufacturing has decreased in america. That isn't true......too much automation is used as a boogyman in manufacturing.

When most americans don't know that 80% of the stuff in their homes are made in mexico and china and made by hand.

In my profession I travel around the world dealing with manufacturing facilities and suppliers. Most this stuff is made with a humans performing labor tasks and if it is done by a machine at the most it is labor intense hand machines or labor intense semi automated.

I am talking about TVs, cell phones, nikes, caste dies that make your car engineer parts, circuit boards that go in your electronics all this stuff.

And even if some steps are semi automated it is still inspected by human eyes and god forbid it has yield issues (failures) it is broken down by human hands and repaired by human hands.

That is not to say that automation isnt the future....but I want us to be accurate here.

One last thing as automation or semi automation is a big push because of two things. The economy is good so truck loads of money is thrown into R&D (which comes to a stand still whenever the economy tanks) and labor rates.

You can travel to india and mexico and see very little automation and semi automation. You may ask why? Well for one the labor rates are low and operators make maybe 3 dollars an hour. The populations are large, there is very few skilled folks to work on these machines and their are no unions. So this is an employers dream. Why spend well over 1 mill for each automated or 200k for each semi automated machine. It will take you a while to get a IRO. When your workers are cheap and expendable.

Another thing the overhead on automated and semi automated machines are high and they need highly skilled technicians. Most of the technology is state of the art and done by small companies who have small staffs. It can take weeks and months sometimes to get folks to come and repair or look at the machine once it breaks down.

Once I had a 300k state of the art semi automated laser machine break down on me. The company who made it was in europe. It took a technician 3 weeks to come and fix the machine because he was one of 2 people in the whole world who could fix it. So he was on travel throughout the world a lot. So often times only the biggest and baddest companies have the capital to invest in these machines.

great post. This goes back to the practicality aspect I mentioned earlier. I was doing a contract out in some hospital in south dakota. When I saw the nurse robot they were using, I was blown away at first. They told me that one robot cost a million bucks. But the thing was twice the size of R2D2 from star wars and moved like a snail. The only thing it could do is deliver medicine to a specific patient room. Anything else outside of that or needing to drop something off along the way or change plans to go to a different room at the last minute was a no go. What a waste of money compared to getting 10 nurses who could do that same job plus a ton of other duties at the same time. Like you said, unless the actual output matches or exceeds the results you could get from a human doing the job, what would be the point? There's no ROI. not to mention the support costs. I didn't even think of that. It's the difference between watching a proof of concept video on youtube where the robot is in some perfect-case scenario in a lab versus the real world

 

[the bossman]

- Creating a plan to transition back to a consultant in my field since I believe the days of full-time, full benefit employment have been winding down for some time. I believe contract work will become more like the norm instead of the exception for new hires of all ages and backgrounds.

Peace

definitely this.

 

[Big Mountain Hélà]

 

[MischievousMonkey]

The underlying hypothesis that technological progress will remain as linear in the upcoming years is not challenged enough to make those apocalyptic predictions realistic imo. The recent supply chain, service industry and energy market disruptions are great examples of the numerous potential obstacles in the way of the skynet takeover.

That's without considering the economic argument that replacing a significant part of the workforce with robots will deplete demand, negatively affecting profits.

It's been 5 years since 2017 and the predictions folks have been making in this thread haven't been realized.

 

[AQz]

definitely could deliver for ups