callmeslick wrote:oh, I'm willing to bet, based on what I've seen so far, they will sit back until it entirely too late. Do I envision massive upheaval? Sure.
The only difference in opinion here, I think, is when the reaction occurs, not what the reaction will be. At least we're on the same chapter, if not the same page.
callmeslick wrote:oh really? I hope you're right, but suspect you aren't on my more bleakly realistic days(this is one of those). And, don't misread me, I am not saying it is just the 'working poor' affected by this trend, but also most folks who blithely imagine they have the skillset to contribute. To wit, an article I just read:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companie ... ar-AAbkHVi
I think where you are having trouble with my scenario, MD, goes back to your premise of the costs involved in the conversion. There, I think the issue is that you don't realize how truly much capital is held in a relatively few hands.
But your own article says, and I quote:
The only “algorithm” processing the data and using it to make predictions is simply the humans scanning it for correlations.
and
It isn’t the end of middle management, but it is an evolution.
What you have isn't the removal of a job position - it's the merging of it into a transformed version of another. This is just trading specialists for generalists. If anything, it's the opposite of what you're saying -
more people have the 'skillset' needed to contribute to these jobs than before, because the jobs have been made simpler by machines. The article even says so:
every employee can have the tools to monitor progress toward any goal
callmeslick wrote:oh, and my nephew is here at the house today. He's 37 and up on the whole Star Wars thing, far more than me. He pointed out, when I mentioned these exchanges, that the Star Wars utopian society was preceded on the timeline by WWIII and massive upheaval, eliminating most of the potential strain on resources and capital by unneeded labor force.
edit--same nephew was my adversary in many a playing of the original Descent, by the way.
... I
know you didn't just confuse Star Trek for Star Wars. Them's fightin' words.
He's right, by the way. In the Star Trek universe, WWIII and the Eugenics Wars preceded the utopian era of the United Federation of Planets. But this, too, falls in line with my earlier post regarding revolution spurred on by tyranny. Which, incidentally, resulted in a distinct lack of overlords in the ST universe, as it would in ours.
Ferno wrote:question for slick, md, and jeff. Did you happen to read the article? and if so, what did you think of it?
I did, Ferno. It made for an interesting read, as far as opinion pieces go. I think the author is perhaps misunderstanding and/or misconstruing the impact machines can and do have on us - for example, at one point she mentions "the threat posed by machines", and elsewhere she says that "customers often aren't aware they are mostly being spoken to by a machine" (I don't know about you, but it seems painfully clear to me when I'm talking to an automated service). However, there was one specific statement she made at the end of the article which I think really addresses the main issue:
"This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
]
See, I AM just a luddite on such matters!