To wonder what will happen when there are no iobs

[rainandfire]

When technology does everything, driving, deliveries, retail ... what will people do then?

There will always be jobs, the employment market will evolve. I also suspect that the world population will decline steeply so there will be enough jobs.

Personally if that happens in my lifetime I plan on removing myself from society and supporting myself on my small holding,

Ah, the paperless office ....
all my teachers told me it was coming
in the 70's

I do audits
"wet" signatures that push into the paper are still the only legal type for some things

We're still 40 years away from paperless for many professions.

"wet" signatures that push into the paper are still the only legal type for some things

Agreed - even HMRC require wet signatures on some forms despite all their investment and enthusiasm for online filing. "Paperless" is still many, many years away.

This whole thing baffles me tbh. I work in the design of technology (so I don't make it myself, but when someone wants something made, I figure out how it should work) and to me, technology seems bafflingly incompetent. I can't imagine the tech we have now being anywhere near 'taking over' any time soon - it is incredibly badly designed, unreliable and full of holes/lacking in functionality. People struggle to visualise the design for the most basic straightforward app to do the simplest task - they simply can't think of all of the different functions needed to make something actually do a whole job from A to Z. There are always bits missing, things that don't really work, stuff that clunks and shudders and comes to a halt. As a designer, it's infuriating. People are definitely able to make software that carries out very very specific simplified tasks, sometimes on an impressive scale (eg the robots that carry boxes - good to look at but incredibly limited). But truly sophisticated software that is flexible doesn't as yet exist. Maybe it will, sometime soon, but so far the only thing that computers really are better at is executing a defined list of functions very very quickly - and even then a person has to create that defined list and creating that defined list is very very hard and usually involves multiple mistakes before it's right.

Interestingly Vodafone are advertising a Business Premier service where you get a personal customer service assistant - a specified person that you call to answer all your queries. There is a lot of chatter in my field about chatbots and how they replace customer service staff but so far they are absolutely abysmal and Vodafone has recognised at least that what people really want is a person to talk to.

It might be possible to have a robot to cut your hair, but would you want it? Humans want social interaction and physical contact and are happy to pay for that no matter what tech is there.

I also suspect that the world population will decline steeply so there will be enough jobs

Turmoil?

We cannot be sure war will never return.

Zimmer Frames at Dawn

I think you're underestimating the potential for driverless vehicles.
Some modern cars are already equipped with sensors to avoid sudden dangers, faster than human reaction times.
And some cars can park themselves.
IIRC the few accidents involving driverless cars have involved human driven cars, in that humans caused the accidents, and those not even human driven cars can avoid easily.

I do think it's one technology that will advance very quickly indeed.

I'm also baffled by the assertion that rich people will live behind gates while everyone starves. Why would rich people want that? They're human beings and for the most part pretty ordinary - I can't see why they would enjoy seeing others suffer. They might not give away their billions but given the influence they have I don't think they'd be interested in living in a horrible world full of suffering.

I think you're overestimating the challenges. The tech isn't there yet but that isn't the biggest problem.

We were all supposed to have hover cars and be living on the moon by now, eating our dinner in pill form. How did that work out exactly?

underestimating, that is!

I'm not so sure about driverless cars Lweji. My DH was part of the main UK research group looking at the practicalities of making autonomous vehicles function and it is so incredibly complex that I don't know how they'll solve it. Quantum computing maybe?

The tech isn't there yet but that isn't the biggest problem.

We were all supposed to have hover cars and be living on the moon by now, eating our dinner in pill form. How did that work out exactly?

That was pie in the sky with no real advances, just wishful thinking.

Driverless cars are already being tested and probably more ahead than you and I realise.
Different companies are pushing for the technology, as it happened with mobile phones and computers. Look where that took us.

I think for some reason humans underestimate the incredible range of their own capabilities. We are massively sophisticated machines that maintain ourselves. Two things we don't have are massive strength and lightning fast calculation abilities - two things machines can supplement easily. But everything else? It's going to take a very very long time to just break down what that everything else even is, never mind build it.

Lweji
I think that driverless vehicles will become ubiquitous within 10 years
but not cars.

Long distance lorries that can go non stop across continents, preferably at night when people are out of the way.
Lorries that back themselves into a bay where a robot forklift transfers all the pallets to vans for onward delivery
and the driverless vans drop the boxes at the door of the shop
all without human intervention
at night
silently

In big cities, people will jump out of their car at their destination and it will go and park itself nearby

but in rural areas
nah
sorry, I just cannot see it being useful

but in rural areas
nah
sorry, I just cannot see it being useful

They may not be necessary, but at some point you'll only be able to buy driverless vehicles, regardless of how useful they are or not.
It's the same with electrical windows. Pretty much all cars now have them, even if not really useful for most people.

Don't be such a Luddite

We were all supposed to have hover cars and be living on the moon by now, eating our dinner in pill form. How did that work out exactly?

You’re confusing pie-in-the-sky sci-fi writers’ wet dreams, which were picked up on by the media in years gone by, with real progesss and new tech’ being developed by the largest, richest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

There is a long way to go, yes, but it’s not that we’re working towards a specific goal (hover cars, for example) we don’t even know what it is we’re heading towards now.

Back in the day of the robot housekeeper vision, the processing power which will determine the technologies available in years to come hadn’t even been imagined, let alone developed. Even in the 70s there was huge skepticism around Moore’s law which actually proved to be conservative.

I'm looking forward to having an actual kitchen robot.

I'm a Luddite in relation to the current kitchen "robots". They are anything but.

I need one that actually picks up the ingredients and does everything with them. While I MN in peace.

I'll believe that the technology is really there when

• my roomba learns to do the whole room once not bits of it 7 times
• when it learns to throw dirty clothes in the laundry basket and then clean the whole floor rather than go round the teen junk
• when it can do the stairs

till then I'm pretty sure humans will not be out of work

They may not be necessary, but at some point you'll only be able to buy driverless vehicles, regardless of how useful they are or not

And we're back to the hover cars idea. '

It wasn't just sci-fi writers at all. It was the popular idea, what many people thought would happen. Very much like the assumptions in this thread.

There is so much more to it than processing power and speed. You can't equate this stuff to phones and computers. The kind of tech you are imagining here is to a mobile phone what a rock is to the latest power tools.

LeCroissant - never underestimate man’s inhumanity to man.

It’s all part of the greater plan to keep the population in line.

Currently, nearl 1/2 of the world's population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day. 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.

So yeah. It’ll only get worse.

I'm also baffled by the assertion that rich people will live behind gates while everyone starves.

I'm not

Rescources are also dwindling. We will be back in the Dark Ages in no time once the oil runs out. Renewable energy is not keeping up with demands.

Rescources are also dwindling. We will be back in the Dark Ages in no time once the oil runs out. Renewable energy is not keeping up with demands.

Resources aren't running out any time soon. But the "easy" to obtain resources may run out. By then, technology would have improved to make the harder to obtain resources more accessible. I used to work in the oil & gas tech sector - our firm was working with the top exploration companies to find ways of getting oil & gas from the most inhospitable places on Earth, i.e. setting up drills at the bottom of oceans, all done remotely, that could never have happened just a few years earlier. Same with very deep oil/gas reserves where we worked on developing pumps etc that went down deep wells to pump the oil up from very large distances underground rather than the traditional way of sucking oil out of the wells. As tech improves, it becomes more economical to get the harder to reach resources.