i'm looking forward to driving home in my flying car to my condo on the moon. or maybe this takes 300 years rather than 50.
You have to remember, robots are still made out of materials. In the case of my plant, we deal with a lot of severely corrosive materials. Yeah you could have a robot made of corrosion resistant materials such as composites, and yes, the manufacturing could get cheaper, but compared to a human, it's still a bit clunky and you can also get into a situation where coding could contradict itself and freeze up a program. These are just a few examples, but until you get a robot that could do all the things an operator can, with a duty cycle of more than a few years, and a price tag of 5 digits instead of 6 or 7, the human is going to be more cost effective, and I don't see that changing in the next half century.
I don't think it's a "sky is falling" deal. As the ability to automate tasks gets cheaper, jobs that are pretty much automatic in nature will be taken. For example, there used to be this african fella who greeted me at the parking garage at the gym and gave me a little ticket stub, and then collected it when I left and pushed a button to make the gate go up. Now there's a machine that does all that, and the african fella has had to move on.
But there are plenty of manufacturing jobs that don't require one to stand in the same area the whole shift. Even at car factories, humans are still necessary. Or else, why would VW and Nissan have so many workers?
Right, but not anymore. It seems like we're on the same page to the extent that we agree that automation will replace jobs. I can't imagine that you disagree that the technology for automating things is getting really really good, and so I'll assume we're on the same page there. So what are you arguing here? The scope of job replacement? Or whether it matters at all? And those two questions are causally intertwined in that if you underestimate the amount of jobs that can be replaced by really smart robotics, then you would in turn downplay the effects of said replacement.
I am sure something will come up, but the main thing I am thinking of is what jobs will people be able to get to replace the jobs they lost to the computers/robots? There were always service jobs or white collar jobs to go into, but even those are disappearing as AI improves to the point that it can make decisions better than you and I can. It will be interesting to see how economics change as more and more automation comes online and there are fewer and fewer traditional jobs to fill.
I honestly think we'd see a move away from automation some if widespread unemployment became the rule. The stakeholder approach to business operations would rule. There is a hierarchy within stakeholder stack that changes with the environment in
That's the thing about economics is that it deals with scarcity, so as long as the market isn't too tied down by regulations and policies I think it will adapt just fine.
To an extent, yes. The issue I see is with the jobs to population ratio, and more specifically jobs to qualified population. There will always be work for humans, but those roles will become more specialized requiring skills a lot of folks simply will not have nor the capacity to obtain. Manufacturing and service industries will no longer be the fallbacks they are today.
