AI is Rapidly Changing the Types and Location of the Best-Paying Jobs (technologyreview.com) 162
Artificial intelligence and automation are not likely to cause vast unemployment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the impact on jobs. From a report: "I'm not worried about technological unemployment," said Laura Tyson, a prominent economist at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "But I am worried about the quality of jobs created and the location where they are created." Speaking this week at EmTech Digital, an annual AI conference organized by MIT Technology Review, Tyson suggested we look the effects of increasing automation over the last 30 years. What we know, says Tyson, is that automation has taken away many routine jobs.
Particularly hard hit have been middle-skill and middle-income jobs, such as those in manufacturing. "We know from the past that the jobs that require low skills are more likely to be automated," said Tyson. "I worry about income inequality." Automation and AI will create new jobs. But, said Tyson, those new jobs might not be in the same parts of the country in which employment has been decreased by automation. And that has created frustrations and concerns in many parts of the US, including the Midwest. Technology advances have greatly changed jobs in the past, of course, most notably during the Industrial Revolution. But, Tyson said, the rate of change is much faster today, and there are some vital questions unanswered. Can we come up with a way to retrain workers? And, asked Tyson, who will pay for that retraining?
Particularly hard hit have been middle-skill and middle-income jobs, such as those in manufacturing. "We know from the past that the jobs that require low skills are more likely to be automated," said Tyson. "I worry about income inequality." Automation and AI will create new jobs. But, said Tyson, those new jobs might not be in the same parts of the country in which employment has been decreased by automation. And that has created frustrations and concerns in many parts of the US, including the Midwest. Technology advances have greatly changed jobs in the past, of course, most notably during the Industrial Revolution. But, Tyson said, the rate of change is much faster today, and there are some vital questions unanswered. Can we come up with a way to retrain workers? And, asked Tyson, who will pay for that retraining?
Income Inequality (Score:2, Insightful)
"We know from the past that the jobs that require low skills are more likely to be automated," said Tyson. "I worry about income inequality."
Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income? Or inversely, what's wrong with paying higher skilled people more? You should be paid based on what you bring to the table. If all you offer is a warm body that's nominally slightly smarter than a chimp, we should pay you slightly more than we would a chimp.
Let them die. [Re:Income Inequality] (Score:5, Insightful)
"We know from the past that the jobs that require low skills are more likely to be automated," said Tyson. "I worry about income inequality."
Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income?
The worry is not about lower skilled people getting "less" income; it's about them having zero income and zero prospect of getting income.
Right now, the approach to welfare is to prioritize making anybody on welfare get a job. But what do we do if there are no jobs available, even if they are willing, even desparate, to work?
Of course, you can just take the libertarian approach: let them starve. The problem only exists if we have a society that is unwilling to have people starve to death if they are unable to find a job.
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Who would have thought twenty years ago there were billions of dollars to be made out of silly cat videos and making funny faces into a camera? So long as people are alive, there's a way to make money off of them, meaning there's a way for them to make money.
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those two statements are not the same. The folks making money off the silly cat videos are the ones with massive server farms, not the ones with the cats.
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Letting them starve may be the Libertarian position - I'm not one, so I can't say - but it certainly isn't the libertarian position.
The libertarian position is that people are happy to help their neighbors who need help, and we really need to stop using our government to interfere in that process.
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Re: Let them die. [Re:Income Inequality] (Score:2)
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Re:Let them die. [Re:Income Inequality] (Score:5, Insightful)
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Africa seems to be an entire continent with a population of 1.2 billion run on libertarian principles. Doesn't seem to be working out quite like Ayn Rand/MIlton Freidman fans would predict.
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Re: Let them die. [Re:Income Inequality] (Score:2)
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I must have missed the memo about Syria being moved to Africa.
If you had ever spoken to someone who has escaped a despotic regime or war zone in sub Saharan Africa (I have), it's not that Africans feel it is Europe's job, but that it is somewhere that they can go, and often other countries in the region will not or cannot accommodate them.
Going back to Syria, Lebanon has accepted over one million refugees into a population of four million, and simply does not have the resources to accept more, and hasn't ha
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Not everyone I know who's busting their ass can afford a house or fancy restaurants except once in a while, and they're limited as to the "rest of the world" they can afford to vacation in. Ass-busting is by no means a guarantee of success.
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Give a man a rifle and... [Re:Let them die.] (Score:2)
I suggest we live up to the libertarian ideal of the second amendment. Give all those without work a rifle and all the ammo they can use....
That's socialism. The libertarian solution would require them to buy a rifle.
But, in the libertarian paradise rifles will be cheap, because free enterprise.
Re:Income Inequality (Score:4, Funny)
If all you offer is a warm body that's nominally slightly smarter than a chimp, we should pay you slightly more than we would a chimp.
The federal endangered species act prohibits hourly employment for chimps.
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The federal endangered species act prohibits hourly employment for chimps.
. . . the chimp claims that he is a member of the new Gig Economy, and technically not an employee.
. . . and the chimp uses an app, to prove it!
Re:Income Inequality (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that we've amplified the spread to insane and astronomical proportions that don't remotely reflect the difference in the value of the work. Now we have people doing exhausting work being ordered around by robots in a warehouse all day who can barely support themselves, and top executives taking home 7-8 digits a year for some light office work that doesn't even require a whole lot of skill.
It's really a form of plagiarism - the top management is effectively claiming credit for work done by others and reallocating the pay to suit. In a sane world, minimum wage would be plenty enough for an adult to support themselves, and nobody would make more than perhaps 10x that.
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If the top executives are doing unskilled light office work for huge salaries, why isn't there a bidding war for those jobs? Why doesn't someone offer to do the same plagiarism for less money?
Re:Income Inequality (Score:5, Insightful)
because the board of directors is largely made up of CEOs of other corporations who don't want to set a precedent that they might not be necessary?
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Big fucking deal, competing pressures, public speaking and frequent travel are not a terribly unusual combination. Doesn't sound too different from a sales rep or sales manager job that pays 5, maybe 6 digits a year in fact. Try making up another excuse for the new royalty capitalism has saddled us with.
Re:Income Inequality (Score:4, Insightful)
Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income? Or inversely, what's wrong with paying higher skilled people more? You should be paid based on what you bring to the table. If all you offer is a warm body that's nominally slightly smarter than a chimp, we should pay you slightly more than we would a chimp.
The first official (and required by the Dodd-Frank laws) CEO vs. Employee pay ratio reports are in, noting the average ratio is currently about 270:1 (it was 42:1 in 1980) with the CEO of Honeywell, Darius Adamczyk, topping the list at 333 times as much as a median Honeywell employee last year. From: http://www.latimes.com/busines... [latimes.com]:
The raw figures are these: Adamczyk, $16.8 million. Median employee: $50,296.
I can't seriously believe any CEO brings that much to any table, and this kind of disparity implies we're all worker chimps.
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The pay ratio is going to spread even if the CEO isn't taking any more money per employee, so long as you have a lot of employees. Look at the recent history of mergers and acquisitions and imagine the giant empires these people get to tithe.
In a small business with 3 employees (including the CEO), the CEO might make $70k, while the workers make $40k. That's a spread of 1.75:1, with the CEO receiving $35k per employee or what amounts to 87.5% of each employee's paycheck for himself.
Take a business wit
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Remember that the ratio is to the "median" [wikipedia.org] (middle) employee salary, not average.
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Doesn't really change the point. The mean is probably higher in service-oriented businesses (many low-paid workers) and lower in skilled-worker-oriented businesses (many highly-paid workers) in comparison to the median, although only negligibly. In the Home Depot example, the $20k employees are probably the median: they're your floor personnel.
Median is a type of average; the last one is mode.
The whole point is that merging 400 businesses into one giant conglomerate (Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, etc.) g
Google Buses (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember all the crap a couple years ago about the Google buses and the resentment? That's the beginning of what's happening.
But in reality in the USA is that unless you picked your parents well and got the genes and nurturing to be big and smart for high paying jobs, you'll be relegated to shit jobs.
See, we were all brought up with the cultural myth that if you just work hard enough, you can achieve anything.
But the reality is that you have to be born in the right family.
The Meritocracy in the USA is a fa
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It used to be true, but that's a long time ago: https://thecurrentmoment.wordp... [wordpress.com]
Ask the Germans (Score:3)
Basically, there are consequence for abandoning 50-70% of the population to desperate poverty.
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Remember: during the great depression 25% of the people were unemployed.
Some years ago the prediction was: 40% of the current jobs have the potential to be automated by 2030.
Lots of other jobs will not be automated, but many tasks will be automated, which means: they will end up being more productive OR those jobs will require less people.
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Requiring fewer human labor hours for the same result is the definition of increased productivity.
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"Just what is wrong with lower skilled people getting less income?"
As you will likely discover, one problem is that unemployable people don't have much to do but sit around and think about ways to acquire money. Those are very likely to involve either violence -- hitting you over the head with a brick in order to make off with your wallet/purse/vehicle; or extortion -- nice house you have there, be a shame if something happened to it; or stealing infrastructure components -- no internet today, the vandals
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Actually, we don't "know" that applies to the current situation. Understanding history is important, but you also need to understand it well enough to recognize when the situations are different. Don't confuse robotics with AI.
The top GO player in the world? An AI. Has it ever been beaten? Yes, by a more advanced AI. Same with Chess and pretty well any other game based on deep analysis of patterns.
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A more clickbait headline way of describing it would be:
The 'highest skilled job' has actually already been automated with better results than humans.
As I understood/remember reading it: this 'highest skilled job' is the job that requires the most years of education of all jobs that exist. It's the specialized field of long cancer diagnosis aka looking at X-ray photos and trying to determine the type of long cancer a person has. This is clearly a job which just has 'one task' and thus can be fully automated
Automation Resistance (Score:2)
Maybe things are changing but for years I've seen resistance to automating software testing, despite the costs of automation being not much higher than manually running the tests one time. Automated tests are not only faster but more repeatable and reliable. Plus it isn't usually someone qualified to run the tests that run them, it is someone that is qualified to develop the tests, and would rather be doing something more interesting, that is running them.
Neatly outlines the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can you retrain thousands of older, high school educated factory workers to become coders, creative types, etc.?
Retraining is not the answer. Despite what a lot of folks would like to believe, you can't educate someone beyond their intelligence.
Retraining is not the answer.
We need to grow exports! Now let me explain in detail . . .
The IT industry cannot find enough workers with IT skills, so we are forced to import them as H1-Bs from places like India and China. This leads to a human trade imbalance.
So the answer is right in front of us: Instead of uselessly trying to retrain folks . . . we need to export the
Re:Neatly outlines the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you retrain thousands of older, high school educated factory workers to become coders, creative types, etc.? Even if you theoretically could, would they want to, ...
That's a good point. Removing "needing the money" from the equation, blue-collar jobs are often vastly different than white-collar jobs and appeal to different people differently. Factory jobs are usually 9-5 (or some shift) schedule with no responsibilities outside those hours. We all know that coding, sysadmin and other high-tech and/or creative jobs have more fluid hours. Sure, some of like that and are wired well for that, but not everyone is.
There are reasons other than lack of or access to higher education that people choose blue-collar jobs. There are lots of people with 160 IQs washing dishes at Denny's (I read this in a book called "Gifted Grownups" about gifted adults people who don't achieve what others would call their potential -- either by choice or circumstance.)
In addition, retrained workers also have to compete with worker with longer experience and, perhaps, higher education/training in the fields they are trying to enter.
Re:Neatly outlines the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine how stupid someone with an IQ of 100 is. Then imagine that half the world is dumber than that. (George Carlin)
Not everyone CAN be retrained to be an engineer, but they still have the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I do. Universal income is one solution. A fairly generous social welfare state is another.
Training someone with an IQ of 80 to be an engineering guru is not a solution -- it's an exercise in futility where we gain the ability to blame the individual and do nothing to solve the problem.
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"Horses didn't get unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they are unemployable. There is little work a horse can do to pay for it's housing and hay. And many bright perfectly capable humans will find themselves the new horse: Unemployable through no fault of their own."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This is why people around the world are at least looking into Universal Basic Income.
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"Training someone with an IQ of 80"
Ooh, ooh, I know, I know! They could all get Social Justice Warrior/Angry Studies/Clown Quarter/Grievance Mongering degrees, go into government and make rules for everyone smarter than themselves!
Oh, wait...
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Oddly enough, basically everyone can be retrained to be an engineer. It just takes motivation. Not everyone is interested in doing so, and there's nothing you can really do about that besides put them on Modafinil so their attention system is under their absolute control (it doesn't make them smarter; it just lets them override some basic impulses).
Our bleak future (Score:4, Insightful)
It is absurd myth that there will be new types of jobs. Just look at laid off coal miners or rust belt manufacturing workers. They are pretty much done for, and for multiple generations. The same will happen to office workers.
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Neo-feudalism
It is unlikely that people would willingly assume neo-serf roles. It is much more likely that violent collapse of society followed by some kind of *ism.
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The future is a lot like downtown Phoenix. Nice, shiny new high-rises and little cafes where people clad in suit and tie go out for lunch.
Then about three blocks away you have a shanty-town filled with houses made out of corrugated aluminium.
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Some percentage of them, yes... but then some percentage of workers get screwed whenever minimum wage rises as well.
It is, historically, a minority of those workers.
That's not to say that these people are unimportant, but the long term benefits still outweigh it.
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the long term benefits still outweigh it.
Who do you think going to get these long-term benefits? If you look at the wealth inequality trends, it is clear that short term pain will be all for displaced workers, and long term benefits are going to exclusively go to the top 1%.
Unless society also becomes more egalitarian as result of automation (and there is no reason to believe ti would do so), automation will lead to just permanent screwing of some percentage of workers insofar as 99% of population is concerned.
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What is your scientifically valid basis for believing that AI will somehow be any different for society than any other prior form of automation?
Without that, there's no sustainable reason to think that such a conjecture is particularly likely.
You could chalk it up to fear of the unknown, but that's no reason to ascribe that the outcome is actually somehow probable.
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To address your question, I believe that upcoming automation is categorically different. It is at or almost at 100% complete. In the past, automation was a multiplier on worker's productivity. You could enable workers to do more, but you still needed workers. This automation eliminates workers and can produce goods start to finish.
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Historical precedent. That's how science works.... you make observations, record them, and use those results to predict how things will go next time.
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Historical precedent. That's how science works.... you make observations, record them, and use those results to predict how things will go next time.
We will have a very clear idea what is going to happen the next time agrarian society discovers steam. We won't have nearly as clear picture what happens when industrial society develops start-to-finish automation.
The model used for one is not really applicable to other cases. It is not unlike applying Darwinism to human societies - the outcome isn't clear and you should expect deviations from the predicted result. Otherwise we would all have ultra-fit societies today.
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Not nearly as clear, no... but there's not any reason beyond baseless paranoia to expect that it will be significantly different from any other historically deployed form of automation either.
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Well... the sharp unemployment rise in '09 that the chart on that page refers to was because of a recession... not because of automation.
And I call it baseless because it is speculative on the hypothesis that somehow automation that manages to replace more than a certain threshold of jobs we currently have would somehow mean that we'd have large scale permanent unemployment when historically that has not been the case even on a smaller scale in the cases of smaller instances of automation.
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Uh... no.
In fact, capacity and production levels are still down significantly from pre-2008 levels as well... if automation were a significant contributing factor to the lack of recovery in unemployment over the past decade, capacity and production levels from before the recession would have long since been exceeded by now, but they have not.
Suggesting that automation is somehow to blame, or even largely to blame for the lack of recovery is an oversimplification to the point of being factually wrong.
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The "traditional" theories of capitalism do indeed almost guarantee that automation creates new jobs as it replaces old jobs. As a general statement, I believe new jobs are indeed eventually created.
However, there are two major problems glossed over by the big-picture view of the theor
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Inequality is indeed increasing, but not unemployment. The unemployment rate has been roughly steady over the same few decades where inequality has skyrocketed.
Therefore, I'm not ready to conclude that overall job loss is the future even if inequality is. Runaway inequality indeed is something to worry about, but I'm focusing on employment here.
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Could be Soylent Green but with the rich in their walled gardens keeping walled farms for their food supply.
I know what everyone else will be eating.
And the rich won't stay around the plebs, Picture the opposite of Escape from New York.
Massive die off then primitive living... Sounds like a good movie to me...
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Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano "Player Piano is the first novel of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1952. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the negative impact it can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's quite a good read for a 68 year old futuristic novel.
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Time to start investing in that "Australia Project": http://marshallbrain.com/manna... [marshallbrain.com]
Emphasis on "routine" (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a good thing. A very good thing. Nobody — no human — likes doing a routine job. We do them because we need the money, but if a machine can do it instead, humanity wins.
Think of it as the revenge of the nerds upon the jocks. If you preferred gym to a Math class, you should be paid less the rest of your life, and have fewer children so that humanity could continue evolving.
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That's a good thing. A very good thing. Nobody — no human — likes doing a routine job. We do them because we need the money, but if a machine can do it instead, humanity wins.
Well, except for the part of humanity that used to be able to support themselves and their families by doing the routine work that needed doing. They're fucked.
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Yeah, and the people who did laundry by hand before the invention of washing machines and the pre-telephone messengers, and the white-collar computers [wikipedia.org] before, ahem, computers, got "fucked" by those earlier inventions.
Lots of humans like doing routine jobs (Score:2)
And for Pete's sake, Jocks and Nerds shouldn't be fighting
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Where the fuck were you, when washing machines killed off laundromat workers' jobs? When the white-collar profession of computer [wikipedia.org] was killed off by the soulless machines you now use for playing games and watching porn? When movie and sound-recording obsoleted live-performances? Where was your concern for the "working class" then, you 21-st century Luddite?
Suppose for a second, some wonder pill is invented, which prevents all disease in humans. Will you
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That was when it was easy to retrain and there were will jobs to had, but what will happen when the volume of jobs goes down in comparison to the size of the human population.
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Ah, so our times are exclusive and special, and the problem of new technology making older jobs obsolete is uniquely difficult in 2018, is that your position?
Do you realize, how many horse grooms lost their jobs, when automobiles replaced horse-driven conveyances just a hundred years ago? Do you suppose, all of those people retrained as mechanics or some such — for all the vastly different skills required by the two professions?
Should we have banned automobiles so t
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" if a machine can do it instead, humanity wins
As long as it isn't first wiped out by angry, desperate people fed up with the status quo of no job, no money, no options.
What do you think this opiod crisis deaths thing is all about? It's loss of hope and desperation in action.
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Think of it as the revenge of the nerds upon the jocks. If you preferred gym to a Math class, you should be paid less the rest of your life, and have fewer children so that humanity could continue evolving.
That works until your particular nerd skills get automated. Which happens.
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jeez your worldview is idiotic.
The end of strong back, weak mind labor (Score:2)
from the summary
Can we come up with a way to retrain workers?
That question reveals a complete misunderstanding of circumstances. Its is not that long-standing skills are being obsoleted; That has been going on for centuries, yet never substantially harmed the employability of the middle class. The new change is that low-IQ individuals are being priced out of the market by smarter machines. Retraining does no good if there is nothing you are capable learning which a machine can not perform better.
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What I wrote is understood as: As automation gets better, the IQ of individuals that are being priced out of the market by smarter machines will approach and overtake the median. Meaning, as machines get smarter, more bigger percentage of people will lose jobs. Meaning, dumb people and not so dumb people will be out of work as machines get smarte
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The other change is how fast the change is occurring. Retraining also does no good if the jobs you're being trained for go away before you've finished your training. It does limited good if it has to be done several times in a career.
Midwest is hurting? (Score:2)
https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/2018/03/22/wisconsin-unemployment-rate-hits-record-low-2-9-february/449748002/
Automation (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not buying this (Score:2)
Maybe we need to broaden the term of what it means to be technologically unemployed. It doesn't just mean "My boss replaced me with a robot". The ruling class knows damn well there'd be crazy social unrest if they just fired the lot of us. They're smart enough to let attrition and inflation do the work quietl
Middle-skill jobs (Score:2)
Particularly hard hit have been middle-skill and middle-income jobs
This time, it may be different. At least the people picking strawberries [npr.org] seems to be fine so far.
failure of vision [Re:Why should we have to pa...] (Score:2)
Conveniently, the unemployed have nothing better to do and have lots of free time on their schedules to support retraining. So no need to spend any money there.
Right, because education is free in America. Nobody poor needs to worry.
Oh, and that "student loan debt" thing? A myth. Nobody's worried about debt because pay is so high once you're educated it doesn't matter.
As far as the costs of hosting the training itself (instructors, materials, etc)
"hosting" the training? Is English actually your first language? You mean: the cost of education. Which is high, and the trend is for it to get even higher.
the companies should be able to recoup those costs from the future pay of the retreads.
Ah, let's see-- so, you're saying that companies should become schools that train unskilled laborers into useful professions, then they will b
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And unlike the industrial revolution where the man went to work, and married women stayed home, married women are also working to make ends meet in the family finances. So if the husband is forced to move what happens to the wife and her job ?, especially in a significantly more competitive job market.
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Re:First comment (Score:5, Funny)
Yay!
I'm very sorry, but Slashdot will soon be putting its new AI Automation pages online.
In the future, the "First Post! / First Comment!" messages will be generated automatically, so there will be no need for folks to feel that they need to do it.
There are plenty of re-training options available for you . . .
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Actually, Silicon Valley is in precisely the geographical center of the universe. It turns out the big bang was caused by a tantalum manufacturing plant malfunction.