To think at some point none of us will work

[BrightonCalling]

Do you think that because of automation at some point it just wont be possible for the majority of people to be employed?

If that happens, how will we need to restructure society/the way we live?

GDPR is making judging by algorithm illegal.
Hogwash

As for lawyers their job is not to find the legally right pay at all. Or is to make an argument and ideally settle before going to court at all. If anyone will do away with judges or is good lawyers or private arbitration centres (which provide higher quality judgments quicker than courts)

@brighton, hardly aggressive, just caustic annoyed, this subject always annoys me because it is conjecture based on ignorance.

I recently went to a 2 day conference on artificial intelligence developments with experts from around the world.

Not one of them believed robots would take over aka terminator style.

But every single one of them were extremely worried about the future employment market. They saw a time when everyone worked part time and had loads of leisure time but that we would go through a horrific time of readjustment with mass unemployment and the resulting poverty, riots and war.

They had no answers as the people and companies who would make the money from AI would grab it all and become mega rich and the mega rich control politics. It is extremely unlikely they will give all this up voluntarily.

They were not positive at all.

I was reading an article on the “gig economy” in The New Yorker. Problem is that small-scale entrepreneurial endeavours do not generally contribute much to the pot. It’s ok if you make money out of Airbnb or dog-walking or artisanal pickle stands etc, but you have to hope that not everyone is doing that or else you’ll be stuffed when you want taxpayer-provided items such as schools, health and so on.

I agree, Sundance65.

Compulsory Increased leisure time does not necessarily come with the means to live well. There will be no drifting round coffee shops or going on multiple holidays. A citizen’s wage will provide enough to keep the population from starving.

And as others have observed, the devil finds work for idle hands...

There are loads of jobs for baristas at the zillions of coffee shops. Until they get automated. We will just be a nation of people selling fresh coffee to each other!

If there is less employment and loads of people living on a citizen's wage, there will be fewer places to go for leisure activities. The citizen's wage will have to be low enough to still encourage people to take jobs like working in cafes and leisure centres, so the only people who will be able to pay for leisure activities will be the computer programmers and the CEO's. That will make the leisure industry tiny but better paid, I presume to make it worthwhile going to work, so the coffee will have to be expensive. It's an interesting topic. Not sure if there's an answer.

This is relevant to this thread... Read the time machine! (the book is nothing like the films!)

I'm an optimist about this. If you could say to a robot, 'Chop down those trees and build me a house', would you bother slaving over a mortgage for 25 years? If your food was farmed by robots and delivered to your house by drone, or you could just jump in a car and say 'Drive me to Monaco', why bother to work? Imagine what freedoms you could enjoy, to pursue what interests you rather than what you HAVE to do? I'd bloody love it.

BT has just announced 13,000 redundancies today. Mostly mid-level positions. Apparently they will employ 6,000 but there is no timeline.

I remember in the early 1970s I was working as a Director’s PA for a large multi national company. It was thought that in the future ie 2000s people would be working 3 day weeks and have lots of leisure time. We now have zero hour contracts and are working longer hours than ever. People on benefits don’t have the money to support leisure activities.

Sundance
THe trouble with conferences like that is that they are full of people who do not do manual jobs

• cleaning
• caring
• food prep
• building

look at the problems Tesla are having trying to make an automated car plant - every other manufacturer uses robots AND people

find me the robot that can clean and tidy a teenagers room
CHEAPER AND QUICKER than a human

AI is pretty crap dealing with stuff for which it is not programmed
and algorithms are only as good as their training data

eg taps that do not recognise brown hands ....

@DrEustaciaBenson - except since the 1960's, many industrial towns found factories shut down when mass movement of goods made or cheaper to make them oversees and ship to the UK, there's many a northern town that has recovered from "What Thatcher did", but in reality, we just don't need as many lower skilled manual workers as we did in the 1960's. some of those people have found higher skilled jobs, but we still have relatively high unemployment in some parts of the country while importing skilled labour to other parts.

Automation won't mean that everyone can be replaced, but another group won't be needed- human labour will have to be cheaper to make it worth while hiring a person rather than investing in the tech.

Find me any robot in the world that can teach, wipe tears, stop fights, read stories with 57 different voices, remember the family names/situations of 26 5 year olds, catch vomit in their hands and get 26 little people ready for PE 3 times a week without it's hard drive exploding and I will happily retire at 40 and let the 'bots take over.

There are some jobs that simply can't be automated because of the sheer unpredictability of them. No two days in my school are ever the same and because of that, I'm unsure how it would be possible to programme AI to cope with so many little impulsive, weepy, outrageous lives in any kind of positive way.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job

How many of us have bullshit jobs?

I do wonder why governments don’t mention automation and the potential mass unemployment. Is there no wider plan for any of this? Or do they just keep us working pointless jobs to keep us in line and so it gives us less time to rebel?

I don't want to come across all "Tin foil hat" and "conspiracy theory loom", but there will come a time when governments will think "what is the point of the working class ".

Since the Middle Ages masses of working class bodies have been seen as desirable as cannon fodder in continual wars, or workers in huge factories ( often producing the weapons to power those wars).

Now we are on the cusp of it becoming a fine balancing act between the benefits of a working class and the cost of maintaining that class by paying benefits etc.

Add into the mix globalisation, depleting resources and climate change and I feel a huge political change is required on a global scale, but personally I can't see it happening . What I can see is a worldwide mystery virus that miraculously only targets poor people and drastically reduces the world population , or a world war that would make WW2 look like a skirmish, but once again would miraculously not go nuclear.

Badbilly - sadly I think you might be right. I can see human life getting cheaper...

And Idon'tbelieveinthemoon - linked question, but if we didn't need the majority of the population to be literate and skilled for work (only a smal minority), what would be the point of mass state education? If we don't need lots of people 'work ready', will we need the number of teachers we have now?

I don't think that will happen in my life time - people not working. However, things that used to be done by people are already being done by machines like, self service checkouts, self service fuel, banking online, food is pre prepared rather than cooked from scratch at home or in restaurants, robot immigration at airports, growing and harvesting of food etc. Already, slot of jobs can be out sourced via the internet. I think that some technological improvements are good or will be better in the future like 3D printing, medecine, cleaning. However, I read that India are not in favour of driverless robot cars because it would make so many people unemployed. Driverless cars would obviously have an impact on all countries. I don't that you can under estimate the positivity of a human versus a robot in many scenarios. I think that there could in the future, become a world where some people live with technology and other people will live old school/off grid.

Find me any robot in the world that can teach, wipe tears, stop fights, read stories with 57 different voices, remember the family names/situations of 26 5 year olds, catch vomit in their hands and get 26 little people ready for PE 3 times a week without it's hard drive exploding and I will happily retire at 40 and let the 'bots take over.

There are some jobs that simply can't be automated because of the sheer unpredictability of them. No two days in my school are ever the same and because of that, I'm unsure how it would be possible to programme AI to cope with so many little impulsive, weepy, outrageous lives in any kind of positive way.

You are massively missing the point! As a previous poster has pointed out if we don't need workers, why the hell would we need teachers-just what would you teach them?

A basic education to teach a rudimentary read and write function could easily be taught by today's computers, let alone ones in the future, so the "Teaching profession" would cease to exist as we know it, and would be replaced with the future equivalent of TA's to stop the kids from killing each other, and to mop up the sick.

The last thing the "powers that be" would want is an educated working class. Keep the masses uneducated, poor and controllable. Just as it was in the Industrial Revolution, and that was when we actually needed a massive working class.

(Conspiracy theory mode) The people who would get real education would all be from the upper and upper middle classes, to perpetuate the AI function ("the Robots") that would be a direct replacement for the working class, which would become a huge financial burden, rather than a necessity. The rich would get richer, the poor would get poorer, and the "poor" marker would move far higher up the social scale, as all middle management, and any sort of "Back Office" function could easily be replaced by AI. Some of today's professions (i.e Teaching, Insurance, Financial, Law) would either cease to exist as we know it, or drastically reduce the number of people working in those sectors, and even then, their role would be to "feed the monkeys" (The robots).

I don't think any job is safe. And just look how the world has changed in the last 30 years, and no-one predicted the real impact of the Internet, and the next 30 years will see just as much change-but very hard to predict. I just hope it doesn't go the way I am predicting.

I think the main problem with that scenario badbilly is that if there aren't enough people who can afford to buy the stuff that the robots produce then there wouldn't be much point to them. The rich rely on the poor to buy things to make them richer.

I think the main problem with that scenario badbilly is that if there aren't enough people who can afford to buy the stuff that the robots produce then there wouldn't be much point to them. The rich rely on the poor to buy things to make them richer.

I agree to a certain extent, but "wealth" can be created without doing much actual work (stocks, shares, commodities, etc.) and working out the correct ratio of population required to keep the rich wealthy and the poor, erm, poor, would be relatively easy. It would just be a matter of getting that ratio to work in "real life"-that would be the hard thing-but one thing is certain-land is a finite resource, and if you could "cull" , say, 20 million people from our population (either by war, disease or famine-or whatever)-then how much better would the economic outlook look with 21st century economics with a 1950's population.

This is exactly what China did, only they "culled" a potential population, not an actual population, by having strict birth control. Mao predicted very successfully how China would become a Economic giant after his death, and would one day be the major economy in the world. Population control was just one small aspect of that vision. Not a nice man, and not a nice period of China's history, but for them it worked.

With regards to Education, to a certain extent it is beginning to happen already -Teachers not needing to have a degree, TA's teaching more, children being kept at school longer, but not really getting any "more" education, just spreading it out a bit to massage the unemployment figures, further education routes like night-classes and Technical colleges being slashed and related things like Libraries closing. Routes to working class education are already being closed down.

If I was a real conspiracy theorist I would also add in the Housing Crisis, where it is now (in some parts of the country) nearly impossible for Working Class people to afford to buy a house. That in itself is taking political power away from the working class, albeit by a back door method.

Worldwide population growth is a problem. There will insufficient resources, let alone jobs, to sustain billions, even trillions, of people.

Most predictions are that population will level off at 10-11 billion. The only real growth in population will be in Africa, which is predicted to go up a lot, and there will undoubtedly be problems as a result.

Just saw that one of the proposals of the potential Italian coalition govt is a citizen’s wage. There is very high unemployment in Italy, particularly amongst the young.

The idea was rejected in Switzerland as the fear was that it would attract immigration.

I think the ruling class will probably keep enough peasants alive to service the machinery, and the rest of us will just quietly be allowed to die out, they'll put something in the water probably that renders people sterile.

For those saying it's a long way off, please look up the Kodak story. Digital photography was first invented in the 70s but was very poor quality, everyone including Kodak thought it was going to be a long time before that tech would take over...Kodak didn't see it coming but in a few decades it advanced so much that it took over and put Kodak out of business. These technologies start slow but progress very quickly, I personally don't think it's that far off and can't come soon enough, we need a new system from the ground up and these advancements will push that to happen hopefully.