I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim:
> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.
The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.
The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.
"It will be a very long time until computer automation can replace knowledge workers."
It will also be a very long time before computer automation replaces skilled trades. Imagine a robot that drives to your house and fixes a leaky pipe under your sink. Imagine a robot that can upgrade the electrical wiring in an old building. Imagine a robot that could do all the jobs that a landscaping crew does: mow a lawn, trim bushes, prune trees, plant flowers, etc. Imagine a robot that can come to your house and hook up your cable TV connection. Imagine a robot that could make even the simplest repair to your car, like replacing a fan belt. Imagine a robot that could style your hair the way you actually wanted it to look. I just don't see any of that happening in the near future.
You don't need to replace the plumber; if the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber. You don't need to replace the barber; if a machine can cut hair exactly the same way every time, one person can style a hundred thousand heads at once.
Yeah, we aren't going to see a robot mailman walking around, but mainly because we won't use mail. Fundamental changes are coming.
"If the sink can autonomously diagnose the leak, anyone can be a plumber."
I think you're underestimating the skills required to be a plumber. If the leak was due to a corroded drain pipe, would you be able to replace it? Do you know how to seal a joint between two pipes so that it doesn't leak? What if the fitting at the bottom of the sink was corroded and you had to replace the entire sink? Moving on to more difficult plumbing tasks: What if your gas-fired water heater had to be replaced? What if your toilet was backing up because you had roots in your sewer line? Do you happen to own all the tools and supplies you'd need? And in the unlikely event that you did have all the skills and equipment to do all these things, what percentage of the population do you think would have similar skills? My guess is that plumbers will have job security for a long, long time to come.
One of the fun things about having fully automated production systems (like, say, a tile kiln) and fully automated data processing systems (say, scanning 2,000 stock market releases per day and tracking 1.5 million mining leases every 3 days) is you can take the time to do your own landscaping (80 acres), your own plumbing (two soak wells, three pumps, three gravity tanks, ~5 km piping, three waste separation/settling tanks & leach drain system).
The only external assistance required to doing all that is getting a qualified tradesman in to sign off on the work already completed & to do the final official hookup (for gas & mains power).
Hereabouts (Western Australia), outside a city, the percentage of the population that can do that would be most of the men and a good percentage of the women.
Hell, some of use can even write compilers & OS's & do flash stuff with wavelets and what not.
Sometimes I feel like a country hick, then I read comments like yours and realise how sadly urbanised many people are.
In the past month, I have run wire for a bedroom in my basement, replaced a kitchen faucet, replaced a garbage disposal, replace an exterior mirror on a car (teenagers and garages don't go well together :) and replaced the ice maker in my freezer. In the past, I've replaced almost every piece of my nearly 20 year old dryer and some of the pieces of the matching washing machine.
With all that, I still feel like I haven't go a clue what I'm doing, but it sure feels good when you get something completed.
These things are really not that hard. They just take some tools and some time.
I could learn plumbing, but I choose not to. It's not interesting to me. Not everyone is like you; in fact, I'd guess the majority are more like me in that respect. So regardless of the fact that plumbers may eventually disappear in Western Australia, that's a regional quirk if anything.
Well, if no one has any jobs how can they afford to buy all of that sophisticated junk?
Also, who fixes the junk that is supposed to figure out and fix problems with other junk. Is this future human society supposed to make perfect junk that works all the time; I have yet to see any junk work that well.
We won't use mail? How are we going to get all this junk?
This utopia sounds great but we have large populations that can't even get drinking water, before we jump off an decide we need to deal with these amazing "fundamental changes" that will do all these things like allows to get pizza from a magic vending machine, maybe somewhere along the way we can figure out how to just get basic 1900s style plumbing throughout the world. Just an idea.
>Well, if no one has any jobs how can they afford to buy all of that sophisticated junk?
They don't. They are supposed to starve to death, or make some alternative trade economy in vast ghettos.
The rich people, the people who control and own the factories and make the decisions will live in closed patrolled communities, and they won't need those people for anything at all. Maybe as sex workers, but at some point they could just generate genetically-designed people for that.
It would be like feudal kindgoms all over again, with the difference that the people outside the closed walls of the palace/city are not needed at all (whereas in the feudal kingdoms they were the basis for the wealth of the royals, with their agricultural work).
I don't know about that. I think the rich people might find it a touch inconvenient if the peasants rebelled. Not insurmountable, you understand, but ... inconvenient. And distasteful.
Easier to just pay them a small living wage, provide them with cheap entertainment, and dangle the promise of "If you work hard or are lucky, you can become one of the rich too" in front of them.
No, you're being ridiculous. I'm pointing out the reality that this view is unrealistic in multiple ways, it is no proxy. It speaks for itself, really. We have not had any technology as reliable as is claimed so I think it's a little naive of a view, especialy in any time frame remotely related to "changes are coming." As well, the issue of how this is going to get paid for is a real issue for the reality based community. :)
When my dad was my age, a statement like "The entire global economy will soon be managed by a publicly-accessible world-wide computer network" would have seemed similarly ridiculous. Computers are way too slow for that.
The problems we have now will be fixed in ways we haven't yet thought of. We will have new problems, but not the ones we're thinking of. Fundamental changes are always coming.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
That is true but I think it's not an interesting question to ask.
The interesting question is what we are going to do about the rapidly growing unemployment of the unskilled workforce.
Case in point: This will jump to a whole new level when self-driving cars become cost efficient - which seems rather likely to happen within the next 30 years. Automation in other sectors is not standing still either.
"Educate them all" is not a solution. DHL and FedEx just don't need as many knowledge workers as they need truck drivers today.
Also, automation right now is bidding against the humans for their jobs. As the minimum cost for automation falls, it keeps wages from rising, then drives them down, then when they reach the inelastic point, replaces the humans.
So it's not just that this stuff will chuck a great many people out of work with nowhere to go, but that it will drive them to the breadline first.
To fix this, the basic assumption "you work for a living" has to be torn up. The work ethic has to end.
I am pretty skeptical about self-driving cars, for the simple reason that we don't even have self-driving trains yet, outside relatively small systems like the DLR, Heathrow Pod, etc, and it would seem to be that the job of driving a train (no steering, no collision avoidance, predetermined stops, etc) would be 100x easier.
There are actually quite a few driverless trains already[1] and Google's demonstrations of their driverless car are getting increasingly[2] impressive[3].
The question is really only when the transition to driverless cars will happen - we're long past the if.
> It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers. At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient.
I write software that makes knowledge workers redundant all the time -- by making everyone else more efficient.
Middle-tier knowledge job are disappearing all the time because software allows lower-level employees to do things they weren't able (or weren't allowed) to do before and makes higher-level employees so efficient they don't need those people to help them anymore.
> The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them.
From my experience that isn't the case; there's a glut of graduates who have useful skill sets for industries that need them.
...technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Making knowledge workers more effective and efficient replaces some of them.
I work at a former tech giant, now a small media company. 10-15 years ago, this company hired people to write a scalable TCL enabled webserver [1], a time series collection system, and all sorts of other basic software systems.
Today, you'd just use apache, graphite, etc. You wouldn't hire someone to build them for you. Technology has replaced developers.
Computer automation doesn't replace knowledge workers, yet, but computer augmentation and computer assisted outsourcing means businesses need fewer and fewer of them, paid less and less.
> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for humans to do that computers can't.
It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.
At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.
Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.
The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.
The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.