RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Arrow South Discovery What you're talking about is artificial intelligence . Elon Musk is one who is warning us about this. He has an interesting article on this. Sounds like terminator all over again. I hope the link works.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x[/img]
Malcolm2001 wrote: Very good point Blue Pill. Apologies to the rest of the readers for being a bit (alot) off the topic.
It is of course true that people will be required to repair the robots...or is it? With current technology that is the case. The machines of the future are not simple mechanical robots driven by fixed programming. These are intelligent machines that will have the ability to self diagnose AND repair themselves and learn new skills without being reprogrammed. No people needed.
What I think we are seeing is the end of the "job" as we know it. The problem is that our entire society and tax system is built around people deriving their income from exchanging time for money....that is the job. Unfortunately I have serious doubts that our societal systems can change at the pace that technology does. Basically AI robots can do anything humans can do and their adoption is financially very beneficial to businesses. Think about it...a machine that can do any job a human can do but needs no vacations, takes no sick time, needs no pension, does not need a pay check, never will belong to a union, will never go on strike, can work 24 hours a day 7 days a week, does not need a bathroom, does not need severance pay and sent to the scrap dealer when no longer useful. For business that is the perfect worker. But business needs people to buy its products. Who will be the buyers when there is no income from which to make purchases.
This will require a complete top to bottom rethink of our entire financial and tax system and I do not see any government anywhere even giving this more than a passing thought. Amazon and Alibaba are wiping out retail stores...not just the little guys but Sears, Toys R Us and all the major anchor stores for the shopping malls we have all grown up with.
Unfortunately employers do not want to pay workers to do no work. If there is no role for people in a business then no business man or woman will pay out money unnecessarily. Businesses are not and never will take on the role of social safety nets.
I will use the example of a local car plant that in the 1980's employed 22,000 people. That very same plant produces the same number of vehicles with less than 5000 employees. The company did not reduce the hours of the workers to keep them all employed because if it did it would lose its business to the competition. In an ideal world that is for sure what would be nice but to think there is any possibility that any business accountable to its shareholders would do that is looking at the world through very rose coloured spectatcles.
So what happened to the 17000 that now no longer work there. Well they went onto early retirement, got pensioned off, went onto government retraining went on the dole or took lower paying retail jobs and similar. very few have jobs that paid anywhere close to what they were earning on the production lines.
The biggest threat to the western world is not China not South Korea not Japan...it is robots. But I do have a solution. Fortunately I am in a position where most of my income is from investments in companies. They pay dividends and their stock price appreciates my capital over time. So the bulk of my income is not from a conventional job although I do work as well. So if all the worlds people were trained to be investors in Corporatioons instead of workers for Corporations we could sidestep this whole problem.
When I read that burger flipping robots have been deployed in restaurants in California just this week my initial reaction is to find out who makes the robots and who the burger chain is and invest in them as their profits will surely increase.
Alas many do not think like this and it will cause the rich to get richer and those without jobs or other income to get poorer. I do hope that there is another solution but do not see it..
Malcolm